Word: continuum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wise argues the world, for purposes of the law, as a Darwinian continuum, in which humans should exercise a seemly self-effacement -- considering, among other things, that "our DNA and that of chimpanzees is more than 98.3 percent identical." The world is populated by thousands of species, ranging from humans to insects. "I don't argue that the great majority of animals should have legal rights," Wise says -- only those entitled to them by reason of mental powers and self-awareness. It seems to be all right to boil lobsters, by the way, since they have no brain cortex...
...rather than pushing one solid party line, the club embraces opinions from along the entire continuum of Democratic Party thought...
...think - nature projects moods upon us, and we project back. It's a variation on this pattern: A man imagines that the world must be incomparably better or incomparably worse in his time than it was before he arrived on the planet. To admit that life is 99.9 percent continuum (human nature and weather itself being more or less constant, with certain variations, and things tending to even out over the centuries, except for occasional ice ages) might make the man feel ordinary - or, in any case, not sufficiently superior to millions of his predecessors who, after all, suffer...
...This is not the moment to discuss global warming, which of course violates the law of 99.9 percent continuum. But note, for what it is worth, that weather has always acted fierce and screwy from time to time. I look up Edmund Morris's description (in "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt) of the winter of 1886-87, which settlers called the Winter of the Blue Snow. At the end of January - the Dakota Indians' "Moon of Cold-Exploding Trees" - there came banging down the worst storm in frontier history: "Children wandering out of doors froze to death within minutes... Women...