Word: biologist
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...nation's prosperity, can we now conserve and clean up only by making life more expensive for everybody, including the poor? "Any effort to find a solution to the power crisis is certain to engage, at the deepest level, the nation's concept of social justice," says Biologist Barry Commoner. "The power crisis, like every other environmental issue, is not an escape from the responsibilities of social justice. It is, rather, a new way of perceiving them...
...American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced it will not award its $2,000 Emerson-Thoreau Medal this year. No reason was given, but one academician, M.I.T. Biologist Jerome Y. Lettvin, says that the group's literary committee recommended Ezra Pound, and that the governing council rejected him because of his anti-Semitic broadcasts for Italy during World War II. "Had you decided that Pound was an indifferent poet, and so deserved no prize," wrote Lettvin in his resignation, "then you would have no need to study his human failings. But you decided he was a good poet...
...contrast, the Abron people of the Ivory Coast are more aggressive-"but in ways which no biologist could predict on the basis of instinct theory." Their aggression does not seem to arise from an inner, unalterable genetic program. Instead, it is generated by external situations and is released only through socially approved channels. Initially, Abron children are indulged and fondled by all the adults around them and show no aggression-until a new child is born. Then, Alland writes, having been abruptly displaced from center stage, "most babies who have been quite placid up to this point begin to show...
Then there's Robert Silverberg's "Sundance", embodying the dilemma of Tom Two Ribbons, "a biologist-spaceman of American Indian descent," and a member of an expedition to eliminate the race of the Eaters, animal pests who obstruct the colonization of an alien planet. When Tom begins to think he perceives an elaborate set of rituals and social relations among the Eaters, is it interplanetary genocide or only the failure of his "psychological reconstruct" to protect him from his own historic past...
...crucial point is that a difference is not a deficiency. As Biologist Ounsted puts it, "We are all human beings and in this sense equal. We are not, however, the same." In the opinion of John Money, "You can play fair only if you recognize and respect authentic differences...