Word: darwinians
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Last night many of the more than 200 students present reflected the season's youth by dawning skirts and collared shirts, instead of more professional business suits. But the session's sartorial simplicity did not obscure its deeply Darwinian atmosphere...
During the first years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes. Starting shortly after birth, a baby's brain, in a display of biological exuberance, produces trillions more connections between neurons than it can possibly use. Then, through a process that resembles Darwinian competition, the brain eliminates connections, or synapses, that are seldom or never used. The excess synapses in a child's brain undergo a draconian pruning, starting around the age of 10 or earlier, leaving behind a mind whose patterns of emotion and thought are, for better or worse, unique...
...plans, but he eventually felt betrayed when Gates announced a similar, competing product. Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive who now runs the company that makes RealAudio, an Internet sound system, is an admirer who compliments Gates on his vision. But, he adds, Gates is "pretty relentless. He's Darwinian. He doesn't look for win-win situations with others, but for ways to make others lose. Success is defined as flattening the competition, not creating excellence." When he was at Microsoft, for example, Glaser says the "atmosphere was like a Machiavellian poker game where you'd hide things even...
...piece of dogma. Although no sane person would deny that we humans harbor some pretty horrible tendencies and that these have some genetic basis, it does not follow that we are biologically driven to commit the seven deadly sins or that when moved by compassion, "we are in some Darwinian sense 'misusing' our equipment of reciprocal altruism ... into (unconsciously) thinking that the victims of famine are right next door and might someday reciprocate." I believe that there is such a thing as human character for which we, by our choices, are at least partially responsible. Wright could never prove...
...this dark, Darwinian view of nature has its saving grace. True, it doesn't let us imagine some idyllic time when nature was benign and the human heart pristine--a time when, as Augustine believed, human flesh had not yet been corrupted by raw desire and self-absorption. On the contrary, our distant evolutionary past was a time when desire was even rawer than now, and self-absorption less nuanced...