Once again, there’s a theme here: Four of my five favorite places are on the water. This could be because, as a landlubber, I don’t really need to go to other places that are high and dry. Or maybe I view coastal places more romantically because I’m near the ocean so rarely. Or perhaps I need to move to the coast.

5. Nassau, Bahamas. Technically, the Bahamas are in the Atlantic and not the Caribbean, but the islands provide the same sort of weather and vibe, with a distinctly British flavor. A British crown colony from 1718 to 1973 and still a member of the Commonwealth, the Bahamas also hosted Blackbeard the pirate and got caught up in the American Revolutionary War. Today, Nassau is an interesting mix of British and Caribbean influences and is a great town for walking. (Last time we were there we walked from a zoo and garden outside of town back to the city, stopping along the way for conch fritters.) Nearby there are beautiful beaches and resorts, but Nassau also retains its historical charms despite being a major tourist destination.

4. Costa Rica. Having been there only once, this is based as much on a notion as actual experience. But we were completely enthralled by our visit there, by Costa Rica’s friendly and warm people and its indescribable beauty. In the space of a few dozen miles the topography rises from sea level to more than 10,000 feet, and some of the volcanic mountains are still adding on. Central America’s oldest democracy, it has no standing army and caught on to eco-tourism very early. In our short visit we saw dozens of exotic animals, including monkeys, sloths, crocodiles, iguanas, and all manner of lizards and birds.

3. Zihuatanejo, Mexico. I often fantasize about retiring to a certain place, and the two non-American places I think about most often are Costa Rica and Zihuatanejo. “Z” is a small fishing village not far north of Acapulco but, as the brochures say, a world away. It has benefited by the development of Ixtapa 10 miles north, where all the modern resorts have gone. Z, on the other hand, has retained its fishing village nature and the hotels there are all low-rise that don’t destroy the place’s natural beauty. It gets its share of cruise ship traffic, but the people don’t go crazy trying to grab your money. There’s no Hard Rock Café or other ugly tourist restaurants – just small indoor-outdoor restaurants and markets, reliably fake Cuban cigar shops and a fleet of small fishing boats.

2. Cannon Beach, Oregon. Wonderfully, classically romantic, Cannon Beach is an art town on Oregon’s northern coast surrounded by green hills and mountains to the east and the dramatic Oregon coastline and Pacific Ocean to the west. Large monolithic “haystack” rocks dot the shallows near the beach and Oregon’s laws disallowing development of the beaches has left Cannon Beach’s coastline unspoiled. The town is large enough to have some great restaurants and, as an art colony, is full of great galleries and a handful of bookstores. Of course, it has its share of tourist shops, but they don’t spoil the experience.

1. Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. I caught my first glimpse of Yellowstone and the Tetons when I was 11 and we were moving from the Indiana prairies to the Utah mountain valleys. Now I live on the edge of this region, known by the environmental types as the “Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.” My long-suffering wife knows I could visit Yellowstone or Grand Teton every weekend of the spring, summer and fall and not tire of it. I asked Kathleen to marry me on the banks of a side channel of the Snake River as the sun set behind the Tetons to the west. I have taken pictures of moose, elk, bear, antelope, coyote, bison and bald eagles here (but have yet to capture the elusive gray wolf). The area is both beautiful and intriguing, with Yellowstone’s waterfalls and thermal features, from geysers to multi-colored hot pot springs. I feel very sad for anyone who hasn’t seen all of this.

Runners-up, in no particular order: Camden, Maine; Hong Kong, China; Guangzhou, China; Charleston, S.C.; Stowe, Vermont; Stockbridge, Massachusetts; San Francisco; Costa Maya, Mexico; Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; Carmel, California; Napa Valley, California; San Antonio, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; Galena, Illinois; Chicago; Seattle; Portland; Boston; Big Sur, California; Cooperstown and the Catskills, New York; Olympic Peninsula, Washington; Banff, Alberta, Canada; Ketchikan, Alaska; anywhere in Hawaii; Columbia River Gorge, Oregon and Washington; Ponte Vedra, Florida; anywhere in the Caribbean; and the following national parks: Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Great Smoky Mountain, Canyonlands, Arches, Yosemite, Sequoia/Kings Canyon, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Crater Lake, Redwood, Olympic, Acadia, and Saguaro.

And finally, my bucket list: The Everglades, Florida Keys, Cuba, Iguazu Falls, New Zealand, Australia, U.K. and Ireland, select places in Europe, Denali, Copper Canyon, more of Costa Rica, Polynesia, and North Dakota (only state I’ve not visited).

New research is suggesting yet another twist on how evolution creates itself. The research tells us more about epigenetics, so first we need to review how epigenetics has already falsified much of evolutionary theory. I’ve written this before but it bears repeating. The adaptation of species to environmental pressures would seem like obvious evidence for evolution. But in recent years we have begun to understand the enormous complexity of adaptation. It is not a story of natural selection acting on undirected biological variations (that is, variations that are blind to environmental pressures). This sort of undirected process has been the evolutionary dogma for the past century. In what was known as the Modern Synthesis, biological adaptation was described as resulting from blind variations resulting, for instance, from genetic rearrangements or unguided mutations. No thanks to evolution we are now beginning to understand the real version of biological adaptation. What we are seeing is an incredibly complex adaptation machine that tweaks the designs of organisms in response to environmental pressures.

It is not a simple story as there are a variety of different ways such adaptations can occur. These mechanisms, broadly labeled as epigenetic inheritance, can regulate the expression of genes as well as redesign the genes. The bottom line is that the adaptations are not unguided, they benefit the organism, and they are extremely complex. The evolutionary story is completely wrong. As one evolutionist admitted, the Modern Synthesis:

states that variations are blind, are genetic (nucleic acid-based), and that saltational events do not significantly contribute to evolutionary change. The epigenetic perspective challenges all these assumptions, and it seems that a new extended theory, informed by developmental studies and epigenetic inheritance, and incorporating Darwinian, Lamarckian, and saltational frameworks, is going to replace the Modern Synthesis version of evolution.

A new extended theory? This should be interesting, for it would have to explain how evolution creates mechanisms which, themselves, cause evolution (in the form of adaptation). I sense a just-so story coming on. In fact, evolutionists are already explaining this without losing a step. For instance (from the same paper):

Epigenetic inheritance should be favored in fluctuating environmental conditions that last for more than one generation (but not for very long) and may be particularly important in the type of environments experienced by many microorganisms. In such fluctuating environments, efficient epigenetic inheritance is likely to evolve (i) if the parental environment carries reliable information about the offspring’s environment, (ii) when the response to induction is lengthy and incurs a very high cost, and (iii) when recall is not an option or incurs too high a cost.

See, that was easy. Evolution just happens. So long as there is an advantage to a new design, then it will appear. That's how evolution works.

One of the best known epigenetic mechanisms is DNA methylation in which a methyl group is added to cytosine, one of the four DNA chemical letters. The methyl group is a sort of marker that can help to regulate the expression of genes. DNA methylation is accomplished via the action of a complicated molecular machine (DNA methyltransferase) that adds the methyl group at precisely the right location in the DNA strand.

So evolution configured DNA methyltransferase and the associated molecular information that tells it where to add the methyl group, so that later the organism and its offspring could benefit when certain environmental pressures arose. That's good planning--evolution is almost as smart as evolutionists are.

And to further complicate matters, this molecular marker can, itself, be modified. That is, the mark can be marked, thus adding another layer of information to the epigenetic mechanism. In this case, the methyl group is hydroxylated. And of course a different complicated molecular machine is required for the task, and the information of when and where to go to work is needed.

Evolution must have created all these processes and molecular machines so evolution could occur. But that’s not all. Recently researchers found differing methylation patterns amongst mice from the same litter, reared in the same environment. As was reported:

[Researchers] found regions in the animal's genetic makeup with strikingly different patterns. Moreover, these regions occurred among genes responsible for determining anatomy during early development.

In other words, variably methylated regions of DNA have been discovered, and such variability could lead to increased trait variability. Evolutionists speculate that this could help the population survive:

We're proposing that certain gene variants contribute to heterogeneity in populations. In a fluctuating environment, this gives generations more opportunity to survive.

And perhaps this new capability could help answer long-standing questions about how it is that evolution could work so well. As the article explains:

For more than 100 years, mainstream science has embraced the basic tenets of Darwin's view that characteristics that increase an organism's ability to survive and reproduce will be passed from generation to generation. … Characteristics that affect an organism's ability to adapt and survive in times of environmental change have been thought to arise by chance through random mutations in an organism's DNA. However, this view could not explain how such mutations, which arise only rarely, help organisms of every size and variety adapt quickly enough through time.

We already knew evolution was plenty clever. It created genes, chromosomes and alleles, horizontal gene transfer, introns, DNA methylation, and its additional hydroxyl signal just to name a few structures and processes. Of course there is a dizzying array of molecular machines choreographing this drama at just the right moments. All this so more evolution could occur.

And now we add another miracle to the list: variably methylated regions of DNA so future generations could survive when some unforeseen environmental challenge arises. The levels of absurdity to which evolutionists will go is truly remarkable.