all that groks is God

James Hutton saw "no prospect of an end";
ongoing processes appeared the norm.
Sufficient pressures trained brute stone to bend
as documented in its earthly form.
Charles Darwin sails, and speculates, and looks
for mechanisms that might unify
like what he's reading in Charles Lyell's books
of how the seas sank low, and alps rose high.
No teleology, no foreknown ends
just algorithms chugging day on day;
each novel form upon the last depends.
What's disadvantageous gets swept away.
Enlightenment! From rocks, to apes, to genes
reformulated God as the Machine.

Christmas

The shortest day's behind; Dark's tenure's torn
as--sinusoidally--we exit Night.
The Newtons celebrate; a child's been born
who'll teach the world a new regard for Light.
The Renaissance was slow to cross the sea
Great Britain's sundered from the continent.
But no one boasts a brighter prodigy,
the shining lamp of the Enlightenment.

In all his age, outshining kings for fame

not for his bloodlines, but what he could do.

The Earth and stars will never be the same
sir Isaac bade us see the world anew.

Each child's potential--who can name its worth?
Great things unfolded from this Winter birth.

rounding the mark

At perihelion, doomed to tip away
Our Northern hemisphere feels starved for light.
The Winter solstice ticks our shortest day;
It's drinking season on this longest night.
Spinoza's clockwork cosmos calls the dance;
elliptically, we're whirled from far to near.
No least detail is left to random chance;
each step's foretold within the solar sphere.
Beginning Winter as we round the mark
We flock to ski resort, or skating rink.
The party season peaks when all is dark;
we've learned it's bad to sit alone and drink.
It's complicated, living on this ball! 
For now, we bid good riddance to this Fall.

Alien

A cuttlefish with glasses for 3-D
will strike at prey that isn't really there,
when shown a movie splitting red from green
as well as any falcon, snake, or bear.
Darwinian selection gave them eyes
quite independent of the orbs we sport,
and neural hardware that might theorize
'though manifestly not the chordate sort.
As alien as any brain you'll find
A parallel construction link by link.
Our common forebear couldn't have a mind
but cephalopods--somehow--learned to think.
Such good ideas recur, time and again
be it in motile molluscs, or in men.

"empires make their own reality"

Lysenko kept his Kremlin patron rapt
and Josef Stalin wanted to believe
duress would make plants mutate and adapt
environment determines more than seeds.
But crops don't care for ideology;
when seasons are too short, or wet, they fail.
His threats can't countermand biology;
farm folk had none to eat, and less for sale.
Now, politicians sneer at Climate Change.
Again, they'd push the scientists aside
in favor of a policy deranged,
forgetting all the million who had died.
When governments defy reality
our world confronts "to be, or not to be".

mind, unbounded

Sir Isaac Newton knew no Trinity
was rooted in his bible in the Greek
but-lest his books be all deemed heresy--
such things he'd write about, but dared not speak.
Instead, he made the cosmos correspond
to God's own tabernacle for His ark
that He'd called forth, by word, not magic wand
a box of Light, carved out of primal Dark.
Imputing physics to the ancient text
its Bronze Age authors had no way to know
strange, pious physicist to retroject
his insights to an era long ago.
Great alchemist! The last of all his kind
transmuted not base metals, but the mind.

spy vs spy

To target self-reactive killer-Ts,
chimeric leukocytes present a way
while money's lavished on oncologies
arthritis may be what makes CAR-Ts pay.
The cytosol lets cancers' defects hide
surveillance misses what goes on in there.
But TCRs displayed on the outside
announce their targets brazenly, and bare.
'Though failsafes circumscribe a white cell's role,
they'll sometimes pick a fight we do not need.
As killer clones escape their mete control,
a doctor wants new tools to intercede.
When maladaptive leukocytes run mad,
build chimeras to curb T-cells gone bad.

solar drive

Hans Bethe sketched a catalytic ring
by which four protons fused to noble gas
one carbon-neutral drive for everything
at the expense of what's no longer mass.
Two positrons--tout suite--obliterate.
So--net--it's only x-rays get set free.
Disorder somewhere's got to compensate;
those photons bear a ton of entropy.
A stellar system, while it lasts, perhaps.
But comes a day there's no more fuel to spend
no nuclei survive the big collapse
it's gravity triumphant in the end.
Her spouse may speculate, but can't know why
a physicist gapes slack-jawed at the sky.

under pressure

The crocus thrusting past the dregs of snow
to pass its genes along, can't miss the date.
Banked glucose from last Fall's spent now to grow
to rendezvous with bugs that pollinate.
While salmon hatching out in gravel beds
rely on plagues of insects to wax great,
concatenated species, "food" and "fed"
choreographed to each proliferate.
'Til CO2 knocks all of this awry
each Spring thaw sets another record-mark;
red photons that should leak into the sky
get tangled in our blanket, 'though all's dark.
Darwinian biology of change
may not keep up as Climate gets deranged.

freak

One triploid crayfish somehow became more,
each generation merging with the next.
Six strands of DNA--not two, or four--
encodes proliferation without sex.
Ballooning populations rarely last
a monoculture's always prone to pop
there's more to dominance than breeding fast;
one virion could decimate the crop.
Darwinian selection's view is long;
it's not enough to multiply, and fight.
Today's hot strategy might turn out wrong;
it's only looking back we'll know what's right.
Parthenogenic rotifers get by,
but sexless arthropods seem poised to die.

solstice

A endless dance of metronomic grace
a tipsy whirl around our common mass
cartoonish pair in gravity's embrace
Apollo barely sways his stately ass.
But Gaia's dancing harder, as the girl
to trace Ezekiel's celestial wheels
a spritely pas-de-deux for a whole world
like Ginger Rogers, backwards, and in heels.
An axis canted far from the upright
defying the consensus solar plane
consigns our drinking season to long night
where fantasies of trolls and goblins reign.
Each solstice, as we're running out of rope,
rebounding day-length gives us cause for hope.

second time as farce

Lysenko's back, and famine's close behind.
New politicians think they can outwit
established science, like they mean to find
a way to separate the stink from shit.
This time, it's Trump, denying that we cause
the droughts, and floods, and deaths by hurricane.
Defying scientists, whose graphs and laws
all point to costs, where all he wants is gain.
America's become a laughing-stock
pariah, while the world works hard to plan
plan-B that circumvents this strutting cock;
the planet's not in awe of any man.
A leader terrified of being led's
unfit to serve a nation as its head.

Intelligent design

For sprinting, we rise up digitigrade
the longer lever multiplies our pace
a transformation of the way we're made
surprising game that hadn't seen us race.
A gut too long for flesh, too short for plants
and sweaty, hairless skin that radiates
requires technology for making pants
and hats to limit heat-loss from our pates.
A compromise design a team might pitch
no wise Designer's write the spec just so
obliged to carve a non-existent niche
where biomes had filled up an age ago.
No God formed in the likeness of a man
would sign His name to such a stupid plan.

ya know?

Holistic types disdain to analyze
like seeing doesn't need them to mentate.
A world--not in the mind--but in the eyes
would leave the spirit free to meditate.
As if reality were common fare,
plunked down upon the plank at which we dined
full-formed, and uncontentiously "out there"
and not constructed in each thinker's mind.
Descartes made clear, four centuries ago
this murky matter of "reality"
how precious little one can strictly know
despite our fondest quest for certainty.
For bedrock rules on which all life depends,
reductionism's how one comprehends.

M & A

When neutrons stars embrace, it's not by chance
their orbital decay was foreordained,
a single mass, where lately two had danced
but on the balance, much that's new is gained.
The warp and weft of space-time resonate
and LIGO duly notes this distant gong.
Once what was excess got to dissipate
the term for gravity proved far too strong.
Neutronium's its own potential-well
accounting for a lot of mass, perhaps.
But small amounts just blow themselves to Hell,
and bigger wads make BlackHoles, by collapse.
As wonders of the universe unfold,
it's kilonovae that bequeath us gold.

stochastic progress

Cetaceans galloping beneath the waves
preserve a land-based quadrupedal gait
as upright Man so often still behaves
like ancestors more fit to brachiate.
Old subroutines are cheap to rearrange
as duplicated genes are free to drift.
Among the clunkers, each time we make change,
collectibles are there, for us to sift.
Conserving features more like the sublime
absorbing bound'ries play the longest odds
repeating throughout eons of Deep Time
produced the physiognomy of gods.
Until biologists learned to do math
it took a genius to discern life's path.

b'reishit N

FirstLight, created ere the moon, or sun
was stored away--for those who can--to find
each spark redeemed, a sacred battle won
perceived not with the eyes, but with the mind.
The written word made history's first mark
preserving poetry of those who'd died
sustaining what might gutter in the dark;
what had been deep could also, now, grow wide.
But is it metaphor? Or the BigBang?
black-body of a cosmos screaming hot?
A pre-galactic, thermal birthing pang.
Perhaps we'd better read it as p'shat.
FirstLight could cast no shadows in our cave
'til Wilson thought to look in microwave.

beta blockers

When beta-adrenergic signals stop,
synuclein expression compensates
although systolic pressure's quick to drop,
grey Lewys body gunk accumulates.
Substantia nigra's killed off year by year
asymptomatic 'til it's almost dead
until the tremors suddenly appear
and dopa must come in PO, instead.
'Though anti-hypertensives quell stage-fright
they take a toll within our CNS
musicians damping down their "fight or flight"
can compromise their motor fine finesse.
Such pharmacology's a parlous art
to balance risk, and salve to head, and heart.

aleatory

The swallows jeer; the kestrel barely shrugs
each perfect in its own right as a gem.
Both masters on the wing, one lives on bugs
the other's better armed, and dines on them.
the Class of avians is broad and rich,
from hummingbirds to ponderous emu.
Exquisitely, each fits its proper niche
to masterfully thrive at what they do.
No Telos is implicit in design;
a hundred million years grinds smooth what's rough.
It's only us projecting a Divine
where mindless algorithms are enough.
High-aspect wings evolved in these two, twice.
And Darwin's God achieved it, casting dice.

perfect

sous-vide denatures proteins, each in turn
'though it won't sear a surface like hot coal
you're confident your meal will cook, not burn
the water-bath gives anyone control
the hydrophobic sidechains from inside
turned outward, make the proteins aggregate
for lack of chaperones, this colloid's fried
the moisture content's lost as exudate
the lambchops that a beaver couldn't chew
we pray are relegated to the past
they're now a trifle anyone can do
cosmetic grillmarks only added last
the water-oven's more than just a fad
it saves ingredients from going bad