Word: benignity
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...second common complaint was that some seemingly benign items were confiscated. We do not doubt that tea-kettles or rice cookers might be fatal in the hands of the wrong students. One solution would be to offer a course on fire safety; students who pass could earn the right to operate a hot plate...
Americans are an increasingly diverse population, one that in many ways defies definition. And that is exactly why the census is so important. Even the most "intrusive" questions about race, primary language and ethnicity serve a benign, even benevolent purpose: Those statistics allow the government to provide populations with voting materials in the appropriate language, can ensure equitable employment practices under the Civil Rights Act, and can track health care and disease disparities. Despite what you may hear at your local bar or from your U.S. senator, the Census Bureau is not out to rob us of our privacy...
Well, not to worry. As seductive as such extrapolations may be, they overlook what we know about how evolution works. In particular, they buy into the idea that evolution consists of a sort of generation-by-generation fine-tuning in each population as time passes. Under the benign guidance of natural selection (the name we give to any and all factors that promote or inhibit successful reproduction by members of those populations), this process of gradual change inexorably leads to improvement in the species and ultimately to new species as those improvements accumulate...
That kind of redesign isn't possible today, but it may not be far off. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School have already developed a way to equip a benign virus with genetic material that codes for muscle growth, and they have injected the virus into mice. The animals quickly bulk up by as much as 20%, becoming not just bigger but stronger. The researchers have developed other techniques to block cellular signals that would otherwise cause muscles to atrophy, allowing the new mass to be retained even without exercise...
Perhaps the most vivid image left over from the murder of Kayla Rolland is a basically benign one: a six-year-old boy sitting at a table, drawing pictures. That he did this only hours after killing Kayla has been taken to mean that he didn't grasp the gravity of his act and so is not criminally culpable...