If you are familiar with the Ed Sullivan Show from decades past, you probably know who Señor Wences was. He was the Spanish-born ventriloquist whose popular act consisted of him conversing with “Johnny” — i.e., a puppet made from Wences’ hand, on which he put eyes, nose, lipstick, a wig, and set atop a doll’s […]
Everybody with at least a junior-high education has heard of “survival of the fittest.” It is a common way of expressing Charles Darwin’s proposition of the importance of competitive advantage in the survival of a species. In a nutshell, the theory holds that the way plant and animal groups spread out over the eons was […]