Word: darwinian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with "Adam" stamped on them along with evidence that Adam disobeyed God, thus condemning the rest of us to lives of toil and hardship. But it does mean that this biblical story line, as transmuted by later thinkers into religious doctrine, has produced some ideas that resonate with modern Darwinian theory. In particular, the Christian doctrine of original sin makes more sense as evolutionary psychologists learn more about why people do bad things...
...Darwinian lights, the classic sins, such as gluttony, lust, greed and envy, are the unchecked expression of impulses that arose by natural selection. During evolution, individuals with strong innate yearnings for food, sex and material goods did a better job of surviving and reproducing than individuals less drawn to these things. So we inherited genes conducive to such yearnings. In the same manner, anger (another of the deadly sins) became a naturally engrained tool of survival, aimed, for example, at those who would take our food or our mates...
...ennui and loathing. Pundits exhausted their thesauruses in the search for new synonyms for doleful, dreary and vacuous. Ordinary folks made the classic finger-in-throat gesture, or pitched forward face first into their azalea beds. On the cover of the Nation, presidential history was depicted as a Darwinian descent from the triumphantly upright Franklin Roosevelt on down to an invertebrate Clinton-Dole level just above the primordial scum...
...Philipe and Tom's rivalry and being utterly unable to fight back. The weakness of her character and even of her facial features is evident when compared to Tom and Philipe's strengths, and though one feels sorry for her helplessness, one can't help but see the Darwinian logic in her permanent victimhood...
Underlying all these outbreaks is the same Darwinian mechanism: unusual weather such as dry spells in wet areas or torrential rains in normally dry spots tends to favor so-called opportunistic pests--rodents, insects, bacteria, protozoa, viruses--while making life more difficult for the predators that usually control them. Episodes of extreme weather are routinely followed by outbreaks of plagues, both old and new. Among the most recent examples...