Word: darwinians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ennui and loathing. Pundits exhausted their thesauruses in the search for new synonyms for doleful, dreary and vacuous. Ordinary folks made the classic finger-in-throat gesture, or pitched forward face first into their azalea beds. On the cover of the Nation, presidential history was depicted as a Darwinian descent from the triumphantly upright Franklin Roosevelt on down to an invertebrate Clinton-Dole level just above the primordial scum...
...Philipe and Tom's rivalry and being utterly unable to fight back. The weakness of her character and even of her facial features is evident when compared to Tom and Philipe's strengths, and though one feels sorry for her helplessness, one can't help but see the Darwinian logic in her permanent victimhood...
Underlying all these outbreaks is the same Darwinian mechanism: unusual weather such as dry spells in wet areas or torrential rains in normally dry spots tends to favor so-called opportunistic pests--rodents, insects, bacteria, protozoa, viruses--while making life more difficult for the predators that usually control them. Episodes of extreme weather are routinely followed by outbreaks of plagues, both old and new. Among the most recent examples...
...idea of harnessing Darwinian evolution to help humans do their programming is gaining currency, especially in the biologically oriented milieu in which Brooks and Maes operate. Farsighted proponents of this school imagine huge populations of digital agents meeting and mating in increasingly complex global networks--creating in their progeny artificial intelligences that exceed even the descendants...
...language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. So society must teach those controls. And when it does not, then the human arrangement breaks apart." In the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, Clarence Darrow argued essentially...