My daughter on evolution

I want to preface this little anecdote by saying that evolution comes up fairly frequently here, due to Anya's obsession with animals. It makes me wonder how parents do this when they are Christian fundamentalists and don't teach evolution. We've been talking about freshwater vs. saltwater fish this week, including why saltwater fish would want to leave the ocean and go upriver to lay eggs, and how some of those fish, hundreds of millions of years ago, wound up staying in freshwater.

Tonight we've been watching one of the Blue Planet BBC ocean videos, which featured schools of sardines being eaten by sharks, dolphins, birds and a very big whale. We were talking about how predators tend to eat the slower or stupider fish, which helps the species because the babies are from the smarter, faster fish-- and thus the babies are usually smarter and faster.

Anya said that Goldie [our goldfish] would definitely survive in the wild long enough to mate, because she was definitely smart and fast. She added: "And Goldie's babies would be even smarter and faster and more mateful!"

More mateful... gotta love that one. I chuckled when she said this and she said indignantly, "Well the fish that aren't mateful don't have babies!" Probably true, and I'm proud of her level of understanding, I just have to laugh that when you practice child-led learning you wind up talking about such concepts as fish libido.