Word: darwinism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. BOB DENT, 66, cancer patient; by lethal injection at the hand of Dr. Philip Nitschke; in the world's first legal mercy killing; in Darwin, Australia...
...fact, the book's theory makes a degree of sense. Science is usually an incremental enterprise, with most researchers toiling in the experimental thickets, trying to hack out a little clearing of enlightenment. Occasionally, however, a Darwin or Einstein comes along and with a flash of insight as blinding as a thermonuclear airburst, clears the entire landscape. Down below, ordinary scientists blink disbelievingly at their sudden ability to see from horizon to horizon. But their sense of wonder is tempered by regret. Tending your tiny patch seems like pulling weeds compared with such intellectual clear cutting...
...person knows that love is really about libido, that power is really about class, that judgment is really about politics, that religion is really about fantasy, that necessity is really about chance. These views come from an Enlightenment that began with Galileo and Newton and a modernity begun by Darwin, Marx and Freud. We are Nietzsche's children, shivering in the pointless void...
...they do more jobs once done only by people, from financial analysis to secretarial work to world-class chess playing. It's that, in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting drift of scientific inquiry. First Copernicus said we're not the center of the universe. Then Darwin said we're just protozoans with a long list of add-ons--mere "survival machines," as modern Darwinians put it. And machines don't have souls, right? Certainly Deep Blue hasn't mentioned having one. The better these seemingly soulless machines get at doing things people do, the more plausible...
...speaker at the initial service at Hancock Hall attacked Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin. "They did not have the way," she contended, citing the joyless lives they lived. She pointed to Christ as the alternative...