Mental Overflow: Week 23

History-Preamble

Nothin beats Schoolhouse Rock!
TOO FUNNY
Captain Kirk tells it like it is

Geography-Prominent Features

Memory jog: GOOBO (we pretended it was another way of Good boy in another language)

OLYMPIC Rainforest (cool videos)

Science-Natural Selection

Interesting website refuting Darwin
Finally a reasonable explanation without promoting Theory
NOTE: The phrase "survival of the fittest" was apparently first used in 1851 by the influential British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) as a central tenet of what later became known as "Social Darwinism." He misapplied Darwin's idea of natural selection to justify European domination and colonization of much of the rest of the world. Social Darwinism was also widely used to defend the unequal distribution of wealth and power in Europe and North America at the time. Poor and politically powerless people were thought to have been failures in the natural competition for survival. Subsequently, helping them was seen as a waste of time and counter to nature. From this perspective, rich and powerful people did not need to feel ashamed of their advantages because their success was proof that they were the most fit in this competition. Despite misgivings by Alfred Wallace and other naturalists, Charles Darwin began to use "survival of the fittest" as a synonym for "natural selection" in the 5th edition of Origin of Species, which was published in 1869.