Word: darwin
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...more than a century, in fact, since Darwin's friend Thomas Henry Huxley first proposed a theory, based on his observation of broad anatomical similarities, that birds might be descended from the dinosaurs. But for decades, nobody could produce much detailed physical evidence to back up the theory. It wasn't until the 1970s that Yale paleontologist John Ostrom began building a bone-by-bone case for the link--at least for theropod dinosaurs, which include velociraptors and tyrannosaurs. By the mid-1990s, the list of parts common to birds and dinos included wishbones, breastbones, three-toed feet, hollow bones...
Instrumental in Hamer's decision to switch fields was Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. "I was fascinated to learn that Darwin seemed so convinced that behavior was partially inherited," he remembers, "even though when he was writing, genes had not been discovered, let alone DNA." Homosexual behavior, in particular, seemed ripe for exploration because few scientists had dared tackle such an emotionally and politically charged subject. "I'm gay," Hamer says with a shrug, "but that was not a major motivation. It was more of a question of intellectual curiosity...
Three of the cleanest-shaven men in the world are beaming. For 27 years the third blade, like Darwin's missing link or Fermat's last theorem, had eluded them. The idea of three blades dancing on the head of a razor was so preposterous that Saturday Night Live used it as a commercial parody in 1975. To the engineers at Gillette, that joke was a cruel mockery, a searing reminder of their limitations...
...refusal to accept what under other circumstances would be considered a foregone scientific conclusion. On Website after Website, in book after much hyped book and in the Turin Cathedral this week, an act of rebellion is under way. It is not as sweeping as the creationists' jihad against Darwin, but it is also far more focused: what is under attack here is not a vast theory with admitted gaps but a specific experiment on a specific piece of cloth--an apparently pure application of the scientific method that the West has taken for granted since the days of the Enlightenment...
...Louis (Stottlemyre 1-0) at San Francisco (Darwin...