If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in ![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. ![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
![Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/charlotte_casiraghi_red_dress.jpg "Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]")
When I figured out who Charlotte Casiraghi was, I realized that I once sent a poem to her mother. 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
![Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Louvre, Paris. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/delacroix_liberty_1830_2.jpg "Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Louvre, Paris. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]]")
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November 24, 2009 at 5:20pm
by Mark Willis ![Photo of Charles Darwin in 1879. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](http://blindflaneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/charles_darwin_1879.jpg "charles_darwin_1879")
I had to laugh out loud this morning when I heard an NPR announcer quip that today is the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin “going rogue.” He meant the 1859 publication of On The Origin of Species, of course, but he was reaching for something else. If Sarah Palin heard the comparison, she must have wondered about the missing link.
Whenever I think about Darwin and his book, I return to my favorite passage in it, which I steer by as if it were a needle on a compass:
It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
I’ve certainly spent plenty of time scrutinizing the possible role of natural selection in my life of variation, disability, and genetic disease. It’s a comfort to know that natural selection is scrutinizing me back.
I talked about this once at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Read Improvising on the Genome and let me know what you think.
[The Project Gutenberg e-text of On The Origin of Species remains, thankfully, in the public domain.]
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