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Happy Birthday Chuck!


Today was Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, or would have been if he hadn't dropped dead long ago. :-)

Serenity and I celebrated with some TVE Homeschool folks out in Livermore. Jenny set up a huge time line covering 3.8 billion years that was very cool. There was also a demonstration of the sexual aspect of natural selection using colored tiles which demonstrated that even though a trait like a bright color might make a species more susceptible to predation the increased success in breeding due to that trait can result in that trait driving out what would otherwise seem to be a better trait. Another demonstration used a variety of colored beans to demonstrate differences in survival rates under predation. Colored beans were scattered around the front yard and the kids "hunted" them down. Starting with 100 each of six different types we discovered, as expected, that large white beans were easy to locate and "capture" while the small green beans blended into the lawn never to be seen again ;-)

After the science there was cupcake and brownie eating followed by sugar powered running and playing. :-) A great time was had by all!

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