Word-of-the-Week :: "Spandrel"

I've enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould's writings for years. Now, even in death, he gives me new things to think about. Have added 'spandrel' to the poem-in-progress for which I'm gathering words and phrases from the public lexicon.

Missing Gould on the planet.

Furthermore, testing http://clipmarks.com, a toolbar script that allows blogging and saving of clips. Let's see how that goes.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.