Word: darwinians
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...billions of dollars roaming in search of new homes. Whether it be bonds or utilities or safer tech stocks or safer blue chips, the operative word in the coming weeks will be selectivityas analysts look for equities with stamina. And that may turn out to be just the Darwinian shakeout a bubble market needed...
...note that attorney Steven Wise, the self-proclaimed champion of animal rights [AMERICAN SCENE, March 13], does not defend the rights of all animals. Instead, Wise has created his own non-Darwinian continuum to argue for legal rights for only certain animals--the more a species is like humans, the more deserving it is of legal rights. Yet there is a danger in this approach. For it means the less like us, the less likely that legal rights would be granted. We don't live in an "us vs. them" world. We live in a world of "us and them...
...Wise argues the world, for purposes of the law, as a Darwinian continuum, in which humans should exercise a seemly self-effacement -- considering, among other things, that "our DNA and that of chimpanzees is more than 98.3 percent identical." The world is populated by thousands of species, ranging from humans to insects. "I don't argue that the great majority of animals should have legal rights," Wise says -- only those entitled to them by reason of mental powers and self-awareness. It seems to be all right to boil lobsters, by the way, since they have no brain cortex...
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...