Word: darwinian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...idea of harnessing Darwinian evolution to help humans do their programming is gaining currency, especially in the biologically oriented milieu in which Brooks and Maes operate. Farsighted proponents of this school imagine huge populations of digital agents meeting and mating in increasingly complex global networks--creating in their progeny artificial intelligences that exceed even the descendants...
...language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. So society must teach those controls. And when it does not, then the human arrangement breaks apart." In the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, Clarence Darrow argued essentially...
...terrific nose for a story. One of the biggest in New York circa 1909 was illicit prizefighting, and Bellows made intensely vivid and memorable images of it. Ashcan painting, in its description of the Darwinian world of fists evoked by American realist writers like Frank Norris and Jack London, lagged behind literature by 10 years or more, but its attachment to images of clash and struggle aligned it squarely with the American cultural ideology of the day--Theodore Roosevelt's praise of the strenuous life...
Philosophy 192: "Thinking About Thinking," taught by Porter Professor of Philosophy Robert Nozick, Frank-furter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz and Agassiz Professor of Zoology Stephen J. Gould, tied with Historical Study B-46: "The Darwinian Revolution," taught by Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn, for the final spot
Similar reasoning applies to evolution. According to the orthodox view, Darwinian selection is utterly blind. Any impression that the transition from microbes to man represents progress is pure chauvinism on our part. The path of evolution is merely a random walk through the realm of possibilities...