Word: 1960s
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...struck most forcefully in Mead's 1928 classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. It described an idyllic pre-industrial society, free of sexual restraint and devoid of violence, guilt and anger. Her portrait of free-loving primitives shocked contemporaries and inspired generations of college students--especially during the 1960s sexual revolution. But it may have been too good to be true. While few question Mead's brilliance or integrity, subsequent research showed that Samoan society is no more or less uptight than any other. It seems Mead accepted as fact tribal gossip embellished by adolescent Samoan girls happy to tell...
During the 1960s and early '70s, three biologists--William Hamilton, George Williams and Robert Trivers--ushered in a new view of evolution that would complicate this story line. Among its messages: for a highly social species, it isn't just a jungle out there; it's a jungle in here. Society is deeply, if often inconspicuously, competitive. Evolution favored traits that helped our ancestors get more genes passed on than their neighbors got. People's brains are designed less to deal with lions than to deal with other people's brains...
Raised in London in the 1960s, Berners-Lee was the quintessential child of the computer age. His parents met while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. They taught him to think unconventionally; he'd play games over the breakfast table with imaginary numbers (what's the square root of minus 4?). He made pretend computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape and fell in love with electronics. Later, at Oxford, he built his own working electronic computer out of spare parts and a TV set. He also studied physics, which he thought...
...modern biotechnology--the U.S. biologist developed a hybrid strain of wheat that was enormously more prolific than its natural cousins. Borlaug's "miracle wheat" allowed Mexico to triple its grain production in a matter of years, and when his hybrid was introduced in south Asia in the mid-1960s, wheat yields there jumped 60%. Miracle strains of rice and other grains followed in short order, triggering a global green revolution that put the lie to Malthus' gloomy calculation. For his role in helping stave off world starvation, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace...
...years continental drift was held up to derision--until scientists in the 1960s found a plausible mechanism in the earth's internal motions under the ocean floor. Suddenly, Wegener's disreputable ideas became reputable. Renamed plate tectonics, they gave geology a single unifying theory, explaining everything from earthquakes and volcanoes to the formation of mountain ranges and ocean basins. Sadly, Wegener, who perished on the Greenland icecap in 1930 at age 50, didn't live...