A Lark

Visit this BBC link...Stonehenge, Neolithic Lourdes?  BBC reports...

    I had just put dinner on the table, when we heard a big banging, crashing sound from the garage.  Running out our front door, we met our neighbor, running in the other direction and clearly in pursuit of someone.
    It was the driver of this very big pick-up truck that had swerved out of control and crashed through the wall of our garage.
    The brave and fit neighbor, Cliff, came back to the scene dragging the sobbing driver and a plastic box which the driver, a man in his thirties, had been trying to toss into an empty lot.
    For whatever reason, the local constables did not administer a sobriety test or take the plastic box.  Perhaps the driver was related to the gendarmes as he was allowed to back his truck out of our wall and drive away into the clear, chilly night.   
    What sort of behavior was this?  Jerome Bruner notes this, In Search of Mind, "It was Karl Marx, I think, who once proposed that evolution be studied in reverse, with an eye firmly fixed on the evolved species while glancing backward for hints." 
    Indeed, we  could have used a hint.   Had the driver suffered an emotional upset?  Had his meth lab blown?  Was he running from federales? Was he a throw-back ?  More importantly was he insured?
    At any rate, this Saturday I am attending  Dr. Jonathan Losos lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, as part of the Alumni Symposium, Celebrating Vertebrate Diversity. 
    A timely event; perhaps I'll gain insight into the  vertebrate that rear-ended our garage.

    Insights into Ecological and Evolutionary Processes         

• Dr. Jonathan Losos - Harvard University
  Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree: A Grinnellian Study of Adaptive Radiation
  in Anolis Lizards