Word: alarming
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When this seemingly innocuous phrase appeared in Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, it set off alarm bells as surely as ant pheromones trigger the defense mechanisms of a threatened colony. Critics scrambled out of the corners of the academy to attack Wilson's ideas as dangerously deterministic. To suggest, as he did, that human actions were more hard-wired than generally believed threatened to upset the balance of nurture so carefully guarded by those who held that environment, not heredity, shaped behavior...
...first to sound a note of alarm was Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. In a speech last September he said, "For all its risks and uncertainties, the cold war was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relationships among the great powers." The changes in the East, he warned, may prove "destabilizing...
...deputy sheriff for failing to follow instructions promptly when stopped for a traffic violation in Marina del Rey in 1982. In 1983 Charles Porter and his wife were leaving a restaurant in City of Commerce when they were detained by deputies investigating what turned out to be a false alarm for a robbery. According to Porter, he was repeatedly clubbed by a deputy and his wife was struck with nightsticks. Says Porter, a 58-year-old, white, retired maintenance worker: "I objected to the deputy's swearing at my wife, and I didn't stand exactly where he told...
...world at large is not in the habit of regarding the German question as a laughing matter. The pundits view it with the utmost gravity; they can, of course, draw on abundant evidence from the past to justify their alarm. It is not for me to quarrel with their pronouncements, but what they fail to see is the ludicrous side of German events. I should like to redress the balance. Granted that the opening of the Berlin Wall was a moment of high drama, but the consequences turned into low comedy almost overnight...
...wake of the desecrations, 2,000 French Jews applied to immigrate to Israel; the usual weekly average is 50. But experts on ethnic conflict caution against alarm. Says sociologist Pierre-Andre Taguieff: "Today antiracism is growing faster than racism. The anti-Semites are marginal...