Word: darwins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some of the novel organisms produced, and the more conjectural, long-term risk that our interference with evolution will eventually create unforeseeable disasters. These discussions have been based largely on the assumption that any novel organism produced by this technique may well survive and spread. But this assumption ignores Darwin's great discovery: the dominating role of natural selection in determining what survive, multiplies, and evolves. While Darwin dealt only with the visible living world, Pasteur made essentially the same discovery for invisible organisms, though expressed in different terms: bacteria do not arise by spontaneous generation but are ubiquitous...
...from epidemiology. To molecular biologists who have seen one deep mystery after another in other areas of biology settled by the extremely hard data that their field provides, the evolutionary considerations that I shall invoke may seem like mere hand-waving. But in this light nearly all of Darwin's arguments, based on inferences about the past and not on verifiable experiments, could be similarly dismissed. And I would remind you that Darwin's theory remains the most profound and unifying generalization in biology: it is enormously supported today by the evidence from DNA sequences for the genetic origin...
...depending on such variables as growth rate, growth requirements, ability to scavenge traces of food, adherence to the gut linings and resistance to antimicrobial factors in the host. Hence most novel strains are quickly extinguished. The mechanism of this extinction is the kind of selection by competition envisaged by Darwin for higher organisms, but with bacteria it happens in days rather than in eons...
...Liberian ship Torrey Canyon spilled over 30 million gal. of oil when it went aground off England's Cornwall coast in 1967. The Metula dumped about 16 million gal. of Persian Gulf crude when it grounded in 1974 in the Strait of Magellan, polluting an area where Charles Darwin had gone ashore more than a century earlier to study animals and plants. The Jacob Maersk lost or burned some 26 million gal. when it exploded off Portugal...
...gold at the bottom of Scotland's Tobermory Bay, complete with licensed diver, plus bed and board at the Duke of Argyll's Inveraray Castle (cost: $50,000 a pair in Yankee green). Or, for $37,500 each, they can spend two weeks aboard a schooner retracing Darwin's voyage of the Beagle. Sakowitz, while reporting more "interest" than sales, was hoping for a last-minute spurt in exotica purchases...