Word: darwinian
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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...
When the meme began, in The Selfish Gene in 1976, the message was a negative one: genes aren't the only pebbles on the Darwinian beach. In 1998, in Unweaving the Rainbow, I could be more positive: "There is an ecology of memes, a tropical rainforest of memes, a termite mound of memes. Memes don't only leap from mind to mind by imitation, in culture. That is just the easily visible tip of the iceberg. They also thrive, multiply and compete within our minds. When we announce to the world a good idea, who knows what subconscious quasi-Darwinian...
Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has long battled what he calls "Darwinian fundamentalism," dismisses the meme as a "meaningless metaphor." H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, isn't much nicer. "I think memetics is an utterly silly idea," he complains. "It's just cocktail-party science...