Word: darwinism
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Gould argues convincingly that traditional interpretation of Darwin and other scholars fall short of the true significance of these heroes of early biology. Familiar images of punctuated equilibrium, evolutionary contingency and the metaphorical Galton's polyhedron that on strains the evolution are all present in sterling form lot evidence, Gould draws on his extraordinary knowledge of biology, introducing the reader to an incredible array of fascinating facts, sometimes embarrassing in their context Describing a herring's gas expulsions out an orifice next to the anus, he gleefully calls them "herring farts...
...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...