Word: darwinians
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...weekends ago when hordes of people descended upon the city for the Fourth of July festivities. Washington, D.C., is a city of contradictions, and its citizens are no different. While celebrating the democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all, the celebration itself was much more akin to a Darwinian struggle for the basic necessities of life...
Then the fireworks finished, and the true Darwinian struggle began. A crowd the size of most cities began to search for a way home. The Metro stops became clogged with celebrants patriotically pushing and shoving to squeeze into the overcrowded trains. Buses were no better. The huge crowds shut down the nearby streets as men, women and children, young and old alike, ran after taxis and buses, even offering money to people with extra space in their cars...
...anthropologist Laura Betzig, surveying these early civilizations, has rendered the Darwinian opinion that politics has often been "little more than reproductive competition"--men using power to better spread their genes. The Aztec King Nezahualpilli had more than 100 children, as did Ramses II of Egypt...
...Solution has its own Harvard Angle: The conventional wisdom, as I have received it, is that just as consulting firms target the nation's elite colleges, so sperm banks are willing to fork over exorbitantly large sums of money to tomorrow's leaders. In a fortuitous marriage of Darwinian and free-market pressures, the argument continues, Harvard semen is a hot commodity: Why make your child with any old sperm, the advertising jingle might go, when, for just a bit more, you can conceive a Harvard baby...
...fact, Pinker, recently married for the second time, cheerfully confesses that he is so far voluntarily childless, thus flouting the evolutionary imperative to spread his own genes. "By Darwinian standards," he writes, "I am a horrible mistake. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can jump in the lake...