Word: darwin
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Last week, 30 years after the publication of their stunning report in the scientific journal Nature, a star-studded group gathered in Boston to commemorate an event that has been compared to the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species or Einstein's papers on relativity. For three days, speaker after speaker, among them five Nobel laureates including Watson and Crick, talked eloquently about recent findings of the biological revolution...
...Charles Darwin would have loved the British salmon, school of 83. Returning this month as they do annually from their far-flung North Atlantic feeding grounds to rivers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales where they were spawned, the great game fish face a hazardous course that only the fittest survive. Along the way they are likely to encounter far more than the simple lures of sportsmen who gladly pay up to $3,000 a week for riverbank angling rights. The fish must also run an illicit gauntlet of nets, gaffs, snares, spears, dynamite, electric shocks, even poison, believed...
Ghiselin has used some of the funds to travel to coral reefs in the Pacific, and to "fool around" in the Darwin archives at Cambridge University. In fact, Ghiselin decided to give Cambridge $5,000 to help preserve the archives, and he also donated $10,000 to the University of Utah, where he was a visiting scholar, for a series of lectures on evolution. Says Ghiselin: "I've become sort of a philanthropist myself. It allows me to share the wealth...
...interesting that Stephen Jay Gould's theory that "evolution moves not with geological slowness, as Darwin has insisted, but in abrupt fits and starts, interspersed with long periods of no change in species" has put him at odds with the prevailing Darwinian doctrine. Gould's thesis is simply a way of getting around the absence of the necessary fossil record. In fact, evolution, whether through "geological slowness" or "fits and starts," remains a flawed explanation for all of existence...
...better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections...