Word: darwinian
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...idea that flamingos are concealingly colored because their foes mistake them for sunsets. Other biologists have been skeptical of all claimed adaptations, especially mimetic postures. Cott goes to neither extreme. Proof of adaptive coloration, he agrees, "is one of the most notable triumphs ever won by the great (Darwinian) Theory of Natural Selection." In Cott's book it is a triple triumph...
Tell such a man that you are not a Darwinian, and he will usually conclude that you must be a Fundamentalist. If you do not believe in the economic interpretation of history, you must be a "mystical Tory." If you are not a materialist, you must be an idealist. "Ours is a scientific world, a literate world, saturated with -I will not say, the precise ideas of the three materialists-but surely with their deeper spirit, their faith in matter, their love of system, their abstract scientism, and their one-sided interpretation of Nature." How directly their theoretical ideas have...
...startling today as when it was published 33 years ago. Its basic theme - that the development of society is governed by hard evolutionary principles-is now taken for granted by every educated person. At that time this knowledge was still largely an academic possession. The first application of Darwinian theory to human customs and institutions had been made by Huxley. From Huxley, Sumner went on, demolishing one cherished faith after another, with what he called "shovelfuls of facts...
Second Division. After the first division between laymen and churchmen over Darwin came a second division between scientists who did not question that evolution was a fact. The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection declined in scientific favor. This "eclipse of Darwinism" began in the 19th Century, reached into the 20th. The tendency was to doubt that natural selection-the slow combing out and accumulation of small variations-could carry the whole burden of evolution. Many scientists grew so contemptuous of natural selection that they called it pure fiction. Darwin knew nothing of the Mendelian heredity laws, nothing about...
...Conklin stuck steadfastly to Darwinian natural selection (with the addition of mutations to work on), and still does after 55 years. Others who once thought he was wrong now admit he was right. His good friend, Caltech's famed Thomas Hunt Morgan, once an extreme proponent of the mutation theory, now admits that evolution cannot work without natural selection. But Conklin has had to take cracks in return from his friend Morgan. Remembering Conklin's famous mollusc studies, when the first Conklin daughter was born, Dr. Morgan suggested naming her Crepidula...