Word: ancestors
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Structural analysis had left researchers with a puzzle about the relationship between termites and roaches: Did the former evolve from the latter, or did both come from a single, common ancestor species? There were arguments for both options -- until a team at the American Museum of Natural History applied PCR to the genetic material of the amber-clad termite. DNA doesn't lie: the cockroach is not the termite's parent after all, but only its sibling. Which says nothing about how to get rid of either...
...terrified men and women were imprisoned until they could be loaded aboard a slave ship bound for America, and looked out across the Atlantic through what the guide called the Door of No Return. Like every other black American who has shared the experience, I wondered if some unknown ancestor of mine had walked through this very doorway, and I could not hold back the tears...
...faces reduced to speed blurs of bloody paint, the bodies starkly gleaming under the carbide lights, locked in a triangle, the strain of muscles so assimilated into the physical life of the paintstrokes that the pigment runs over their contours. Bellows' contemporaries found such images "Hogarthian," but the closer ancestor of Stag at Sharkey's is late Goya. In particular the frieze of spectators' heads, yelling, gaping, sly, stupefied, brings to mind the faces in Goya's Witches' Sabbath or his Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of San Isidro...
...between 1860 and 1910. Its main frame, the huge grid of chocolate- square blocks that stretches from the Barri Gotic up the slope toward the Collserola hills, was designed in 1859 by a socialist engineer named Ildefons Cerda. It is known as the Eixample, or Enlargement, and is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place to northern Europe in Spain. It received the ideas of the French Enlightenment...
...posthumous man unravels his tale, he twists and turns around an extraordinary tangle of ideas: the nature of artifice, the Darwinian crisis of faith, the courtship of History and Romance. Invoking his ancestor Sir Walter Raleigh, and setting much of the action in the New Elizabethan Age of the 1950s, he fashions a narrative as fiendishly witty and sinuous and fluent as an Elizabethan sonnet. But at its heart is a simple, all but unanswerable question: "What is the difference between belief and make-belief?" Some readers may be exhausted by the pinwheeling frenzy of paradoxes and parallels; others, though...