  After a polemical introduction about the proper activity of an astrophysicist
facing a dominant theoretical model and many Tb of highly informative data, I
review a few recent results on the properties of galaxies in the nearby
(redshift one-tenth) Universe that directly bear on physical cosmology. In one
example, I show that there are a number of ways of measuring, or strongly
constraining, massive galaxy-galaxy major merger rates, which are predicted
with limited uncertainties in the current generation of models. In another, I
show that we can go beyond "correlations" between individual galaxy properties
and "environment". Our results show that it is galaxy star-formation
histories--not their morphologies--that are sensitive to environmental density.
I look forward to a future, perhaps not that far away, in which these results
guide a fundamental modification to our theoretical assumptions, though I fear
that the dominant paradigm may not require subversion.
