Word: darwinism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years from 1882 to 1935 -- years of almost constant musical detonations. The main crisis was that the girdling shadow of the colossus Wagner had to be escaped. The entire community of Europe agonied in the punishing ascendency of the magnificent nineteenth century figures: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Metternich, Bismarck, Darwin. Music was caught in a vortex of gigantic, lavish attempts at the final romantic masterpiece. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica and Alpine Symphony, Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy were all part of an increasingly grotesque effort to revitalize...
Much of it is due to shortsighted overselling of the possibilities of evolutionary progress. Darwin's theories showed that man had evolved from primordial protoplasm. But that evolution from a lower to a higher form of life had taken some two billion years. (Biologist H. J. Muller has graphically illustrated how long it took by imagining the span of time since life first appeared on earth as a trip along a tape running 90 miles from beyond New Haven to the center of a desk on Wall Street. Man appears 7 ½ feet from the center.) Darwin...
...subject of man as an animal is older than Darwin. But to Darwin's insights into man's evolution, the new approach is adding radical new dimensions. It rejects the view that biology has nothing to do with behavior, and proposes the hypothesis that culture itself has a biological basis. "What we are saying," says Fox, "is that it is highly probable that the species is predisposed to behave in certain ways and that these ways are probably more numerous and specific than has been thought...
...behalf of conservation. The textual message is sorely understated, but the incomparable color photography and reproduction make the point emphatically. The wildlife and sheer natural beauty of the Galapagos Islands (600 miles off the coast of Ecuador) inspired Herman Melville, who is quoted in the text, and Charles Darwin, who found in the ecology there the laws of natural selection that led to Origin of Species. It is to be hoped that Eliot Porter's fine pictures will not conjure up thoughts of a Galapagos Hilton...
...performance as William Jennings Bryan in the movie Inherit the Wind, a reenactment of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial." That classic courtroom confrontation seemed to come from another era, a benighted past when a 24-year-old substitute biology teacher named John T. Scopes was actually indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee schoolroom. But that era was not so distant after...