Word: darwinian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tragic stories like these fill the nation's newspapers. But do they have any relevance to stepfamilies as a whole? Yes, say Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, two Canadian psychology professors at McMaster University in Ontario. In their slender new book, The Truth About Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Yale University Press), the duo argue that having a stepparent is the most powerful risk factor for severe child abuse. In fact, they say, an American child living with one genetic parent and one stepparent is 100 times as likely to suffer fatal abuse as a child living with...
Similarly, there are animals that turn on their predecessor's offspring, the authors say. "How do [male tigers] respond to the cubs sired by their predecessors? The grisly answer is that they systematically search them out and kill them." The Darwinian reason, say Daly and Wilson, is that all animals, including humans, prefer to promote their own "genetic posterity." Unrelated youngsters don't necessarily fit into that scheme...
This realization has transformed cancer, in little more than a decade, from an utterly mysterious disease into a disorder whose molecular machinery is largely understood. Now cancer biologists are in the midst of their second epiphany: the recognition that tumors evolve, in Darwinian fashion, as each succeeding generation of cancer cells accumulates genetic mutations. "Survival of the fittest applies to cancer cells," says Richard Schilsky, associate dean for clinical research at the University of Chicago. "We now think of cancer not as a disease but as a genetic process...
...Darwinian struggle has gripped girls' sports with a special intensity. Some college recruiters are bypassing high schools and selecting players directly from the club teams. And some high school recruiters are moving even earlier. Charles Morris, 42, of Berkeley, Calif., a technician for Bay Area Rapid Transit, shakes his head as he recalls the coach who, after watching his daughter play basketball, asked what high school she plans to attend. To be sure, the girl, Casey, is a standout player. But she's eight years...
...difference is that bees in the hive are ruthlessly serious about work--even, in a daffy Darwinian way, the drones, which, in any case, pay dearly for their sexual pleasures. They die as they ejaculate, killed by the queen, who merely requires their sperm. Their function fulfilled, they die. In the human hive, the drones carry condoms in their wallets. Bees do their jobs; if they do not, the whole outfit dies. From birth, bees are very serious about being bees...