Word: darwinian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...game, however, is football. So look for the Darwinian, rich-get-richer, dancing and dissing Cowboys to become the first franchise to win six Super Bowls. And look for a forced smile from N.F.L. commissioner Paul Tagliabue as he hands over the trophy to his nemesis. Big Daddy no doubt will be swooshing at his fortune...
YOUR ARTICLE WAS A REFRESHING LOOK at the new discoveries related to evolution [COVER STORY, Dec. 4]. Darwin's theory is regarded by many as the best explanation of the evolution of life on this planet and is not questioned by most people. Biology classes teach Darwinian theory as one that is basically accepted by scientists. I was surprised and excited to see the idea of sudden bursts of evolution brought into public discussion. These are legitimate possibilities, presented by the explosion of biological diversity, that do not fit nicely into Darwin's theory. I had studied them...
...current theories of evolution as crossing "a critical threshold." All the phyla of Earth "appear" so suddenly that this is called an "explosion." Darwin himself would have been blown away. But Canadian paleontologist Guy Narbonne absorbs this gigantic problem by saying, "...there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods--and that's where all the action is." TIME's nonscientific speculation is the height of gullibility. You tell us that after the Cambrian explosion, everything else was a piece of cake. Even the human brain might be just the result...
...more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton's laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. "What Darwin described in the Origin of Species," observes Queen's University paleontologist Narbonne, "was the steady background kind of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods - and that...
...ancestral environment, measuring ourselves against fellow villagers and usually finding at least one facet of life where we excel. But now we compare our lives with "the fantasy lives we see on television," Nesse writes in the recent book Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, written with the eminent evolutionary biologist George Williams. "Our own wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters can seem profoundly inadequate by comparison. So we are dissatisfied with them and even more dissatisfied with ourselves." (And, apparently, with our standard of living. During the 1950s, various American cities...