Winnipeg's worst kept secret is out

Well, any pretense of secrecy evaporated when she filed her papers yesterday, but the big announcement was today. Wasylycia-Leis was introduced by Sharon Carstairs, and gave a fiery campaign speech, pulling no punches in criticizing Sam Katz. There were an awful lot of people there, among them former mayor Bill Norrie, onetime mayoral candidate Kaj Hasselriis, councillors Jenny Gerbasi and Harvey Smith, and Family Services minister Gord Mackintosh. She's got a wide base, and hopefully will be able to have a solid campaign. The thing that could win this for her, though, is that there are likely to be a lot of people willing to volunteer on her campaign. Given the typically low turnouts in municipal elections, getting the vote out will be crucial, and volunteers make all the difference.

Darwin's 200th

In honour of the occasion, here's Richard Dawkins on why Darwin matters:

Charles Darwin had a big idea, arguably the most powerful idea ever. And like all the best ideas it is beguilingly simple. In fact, it is so staggeringly elementary, so blindingly obvious that although others before him tinkered nearby, nobody thought to look for it in the right place.

Darwin had plenty of other good ideas - for example his ingenious and largely correct theory of how coral reefs form - but it is his big idea of natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species, that gave biology its guiding principle, a governing law that helps the rest make sense. Understanding its cold, beautiful logic is a must.

Natural selection's explanatory power is not just about life on this planet: it is the only theory so far suggested that could, even in principle, explain life on any planet. If life exists elsewhere in the universe - and my tentative bet is that it does - some version of evolution by natural selection will almost certainly turn out to underlie its existence. Darwin's theory works equally well no matter how strange and alien and weird that extraterrestrial life may be - and my tentative bet is that it will be weird beyond imagining.

From the Guardian. On a somewhat more mundane note, Terry and Marcy were talking about Darwin's birthday on the radio this morning, and it was commented that there's a resemblance between Darwin and Harvey Smith. I suppose there may be some resemblance: