Word: darwinian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...resonates with many is that whatever the explanation for dreaming, humans must do it for the same reason that all mammals have done it for more than 100 million years; any theory must make as much sense when applied to a rabbit as to a person. In the same Darwinian vein, sleeping and dreaming must serve important functions because they're vulnerable states and natural selection would have eliminated them if they didn't provide compensating benefits. In the ancestral environment, human life was short and perilous; ever-lurking predators threatened survival and reproductive success. The biological function of dreaming...
...that doesn't require much telling-not that it won't be told and told and told again by cable, tabs and blogs. The truly meaningful question is why that unraveling happened at all. Annapolis grads and shuttle jocks aren't supposed to come unglued. And NASA, a brutally Darwinian place that has been screening astronauts for almost 50 years, is not supposed to let loose screws through. Is NASA not as good at this as we thought? Are astronauts more destructible souls than they seem? And what does all this say about the weight-bearing ability of any human...
...very least, didn't try to prevent their existence. Gay people seem to fear we would die out if such a device existed. But the elaborate combination of genes, hormones and psychology that produces same-sex attraction has persisted, against all odds, through the millenniums. Gays have survived Darwinian selection, Nazis, the dulling effects of Will & Grace. I don't think a little patch would ever keep some rams from wanting other rams...
...Change Your Brain, about how the brain rewires itself, sometimes just by thinking. Daniel Gilbert and Randy Buckner answer the intriguing question: What does the mind do when it's doing nothing at all? (Hint: think H.G. Wells.) Robert Wright, author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal, offers a Darwinian take on how we make life-and-death decisions--and suggests that what passes for morality is often something else entirely...
Greene explains his findings in Darwinian terms. Back in the hunter-gatherer environment of human evolution, you killed people directly, not by the triple bank shot of pulling a lever that shifted a plate that rerouted a train. So an evolved aversion to the killing of an innocent might be especially sensitive to visions of direct physical assault. Imagining the triple bank shot impacts us less viscerally, causing a weaker aversion that is more easily outweighed by calculation...