Word: darwinism
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...when Charles Darwin, armed with a mass of scientific facts, suggested that man had an ape ancestor, enthusiastic converts to his theory of evolution immediately pictured a great-grandfather-&-son development of gorilla or chimpanzee into Homo sapiens. Subsequent unearthing of scattered thighbones, skullcaps, jaws and teeth led to many diverging theories of the ape's transition, showed that evolution is as unstraightforward as the relationship of second cousins once removed, that it moves in zigzags, circles, spirals...
Hesketh Pearson is an impressionable, aggressive English biographer and actor, a hater of psychology, politics, literary "style," for whom "two and two equal any sum that takes my fancy." This last credo has made his biographies (Doctor Darwin, Tom Paine, Gilbert and Sullivan) lively with anecdotes, slack on background. A onetime clerk who answered his boss's questions with quotations from Shakespeare, Pearson began his theatrical career under Beerbohm Tree, whose advice consisted mainly of such enigmatic nonsense as telling him not to suck his thumb. As an actor, he had one brief success, when he substituted...
...other obvious notable was Dr.Charles Galton Darwin, mathematician and scientific philosopher of Christ's Col lege, Cambridge, grandson of Charles Dar win, proponent of evolution by natural selection. As president of the section on mathematical and physical sciences, Dr.Darwin delivered a neat talk on logic in science, in which he told a story from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. When Stooge Watson complimented Detective Holmes for a shrewd guess, Holmes pro tested: "No, no, I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive of the logical faculty. ... I could only say what was the balance of probability." Detective...
...Famed stammerers of the past: Aesop, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Vergil, Erasmus, Darwin...
...semi-invalid racked with stomach trouble and boils, Darwin retired to the country, rarely budged for 40 years. It took him 20 years to work up nerve enough to publish the Origin of Species...