Happy birthday happy world

It's the New Year now (Tibetan) which feels about right, as the sap is rising.

I don't have a lot to say, except, who could doubt Darwin, when watching a human eat a banana? I mean...

Anyway, unprovable theories. Which are called theses, as it happens, due to their not having been proved. One of them is that of Church. Church's thesis, says, in a nutshell, that any computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Which is possible to disprove, by finding one that isn't, but never to prove. Because there happen to be rather a lot of computable functions out there.

But is Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection provable? Well, it has been observed in various populations that they can quite swiftly change in response to changing environments. Not just micro-organisms, either, Darwin's own Galapagos finches have been extensively studied and seem to morph in response to changing climatic conditions. I say 'seem to' because one can never say with certainty that the change in beak thickness has been caused by the fact that there has been a drought, and that that in turn has favoured young with thicker bills. Perhaps it is a natural fluctiation; perhaps both effects were caused by another factor.

But common sense, such as I have, leads me to believe that one has caused the other. Indirectly, but nevertheless unstoppably. It is such an obvious idea that creatures that mutate (and surely that has been proven) would mutate in directions which enabled them to live longer and therefore be more likely to breed, that I cannot resist it.

As for Church's thesis, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to disprove it...