Word: darwins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Loren Corey Eiseley, 69, maverick anthropologist, educator and author (The Immense Journey, Darwin's Century); of cardiac arrest; in Philadelphia. Eiseley taught for 30 years at the University of Pennsylvania, but his poetic writing, which bridged the gap between art and science, won him a wide audience outside the scholarly world. Although reconciled to the fact that "there is but one way into the future: the technological way," Eiseley's lyric musings harkened back to humanity's primal origins and the wisdom in fairy tales. Man's "basic and oldest characteristic," he wrote, is "that...
Throughout the final day of play Green seemed jovial and even a little cocky as he hobnobbed with his caddy and stroked his putts confidently. His behavior brings to mind Bernard Darwin's depiction of Francis Ouimet winning the Open from British rivals Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in 1913. Ouimet's victory was a watershed in the history of the U.S. Open for it signaled the emergence of American golfers who were of the same caliber as their British counterparts...
...Darwin wrote of that epic round: "The clearest picture that remains to me is of the youthful hero playing all those last crucial shots, just as if he had been playing an ordinary game. He did not hurry; he did not linger: there was a briskness and decisiveness about every movement, and whatever he may have felt, he did not betray it by as much as the movement of an eyelash. Yet he did not play as one in a dream, as people sometimes do at supreme crises: he was just entirely calm and entirely natural...
What all this comes down to, though, is Emmerich's last three paragraphs. This whole debate is shaping up into one more in the "man is the center of the universe" series. Copernicus got it, Galileo got it, Darwin got it. Anyone who dares to suggest that the universe is not divided into three parts--matter, life, and Man, with Man at the top--is accused of the most dreadful heresy...
...Dawkins distorts the truth when in fact Dawkins, under the watchful eye of such biologists as John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers, is careful to qualify his statements to keep them honest. Is it not Emmerich who is distorting the truth when he asks, "and didn't distortions of Darwin's theory of 'survival of the fittest' and belief in inherent genetic inferiority lead once to the death of six million Jews?" (Dawkins never mentions race.) Does Emmerich suggest Darwin should not have published his theory, because it could be so abused? If distortions of the little hard knowledge...