Word: biologists
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Across the continent, at the University of California at Irvine, evolutionary biologist Michael Rose has created a community of fruit flies almost 1 million strong. The fleck-size insects spend their time doing what fruit flies do: they eat, they breed, they fly. But they do it for a lot longer. Fruit flies in Rose's colony may survive for up to 140 days. In the absence of predators, fruit flies in the wild get just 70. A person with this kind of longevity would easily exceed 150 years...
Previous Harvard professors ranked were molecular biologist James D. Watson at 49th place, paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson at 78th and psychologist B.F. Skinner at 98th...
...bait station is typically set deep in the woods; fruit, pastry and livestock carcasses are placed in a large barrel or piled on the ground. Defenders of baiting point to the long hours and exhausting effort it takes to stalk and kill a bear. But critics like Colorado bear biologist Tom Beck ask, "How fulfilling is it to shoot a bear with its head in a barrel of jelly-filled doughnuts...
...grimness of this new Darwinian worldview has been stressed by the biologist George Williams, whose 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection laid its theoretical foundations. Rather like the World War II physicists who were horrified by the weapon they had invented, Williams blanches at the view of human nature and of natural selection that he helped usher in. "Mother Nature," he says, "is a wicked old witch...
...fatal. In 1983 a particularly severe bleaching episode killed 95% of the corals off the Galapagos Islands. Global warming could also trigger more intense hurricanes, scientists fear. And while healthy reefs would no doubt recuperate from the pummeling, sick reefs might not. "What we worry about," says Smithsonian marine biologist Nancy Knowlton, "is a threshold effect, when so much stress piles up that all of a sudden the floor falls through...