Word: darwinism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last century, for example, there were leaders of academia in this country who opposed allowing the infiltration of Darwin's ideas into American education, out of a misplaced fear that the theory of natural selection undermined belief in a Creator. And until the dramatic court-room duel between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evolution was still contestable subject matter for the classroom...
...still insist that life on earth was created about 10,000 years ago and that a Flood engulfed the entire planet. In recent decades, creationists promoted their own brand of science and even persuaded a few state legislatures to decree that schools give Fundamentalist theories equal time with Darwin's evolution. Those laws were eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court...
...cave. As they and their descendants traveled deeper inside and away from sunlight, they began to lose their eyes and develop other sensory organs to compensate. But is this loss an active process or just a question of disuse? "That's been a raging debate ever since Darwin's time," Poulson says. "What we've found is that it's disuse. There is no natural selection to screen out any bad mutations that affect the eyes. So eventually they disappear...
...Diversity of Life argues that Homo sapiens does not have the luxury of such a leisurely recovery. Nor does it deserve it, because it is now the leading threat to life-forms, including itself. What Darwin called the tangled bank and Wilson calls the web of life is a highly interdependent system. An event in one part of the web jiggles the whole...
...high Victorian seriousness. Thanks to science, industry and moral philosophy, mankind's steps had at last been guided unerringly up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way to the century of oil and electricity, new and transforming sources of power and light. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable, ordained by natural...