Word: darwinism
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Most undergraduates have read her work. In fact, this woman is probably as widely-read here as Darwin, Marx and Plato...
...interested in plants and evolution before college, when I was bumming around, hiking and reading," Donoghue says. "I read Darwin's Origin--that really influenced me. I'd take a walk in the woods, and there'd be so many things. I guess what interested me is, why this diversity? Why so many different kinds of plants...
South America was still attached to Africa and dinosaurs had not yet evolved when the first ginkgo trees appeared on Earth some 230 million years ago. Charles Darwin called them living fossils. The plants are so primitive that they do not produce flowers and yet so hardy that one survived the atomic blast that destroyed Hiroshima. The Chinese have venerated the ginkgo's foul-smelling fruit for thousands of years, using it for everything from promoting longevity to increasing sexual endurance. And in the past decade, extract of ginkgo has become one of Europe's most widely prescribed drugs...
...classroom lectures. He likes to quote Mae West ("Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself") and Woody Allen ("I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics"), along with linguist Noam Chomsky, artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky and, of course, Charles Darwin. Pinker has a showman's sense for knowing "when to hold his reader's attention with an illustration or a joke," observed University of Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley in the New York Times Book Review last week. "No other science writer makes me laugh so much...
Very few books change the course of history: Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations come to mind. And then there was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Published in 1962, it embedded a message about the folly of trying to conquer nature within an exposition about the dangers of pesticides to animal and human life. Despite the formidable opposition of the chemical industry, which ridiculed Carson as an overly emotional woman unqualified to judge the health effects of compounds like DDT, her thorough research and exquisite ability...