Word: darwins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Charles Darwin stepped off the Beagle and landed in the Galapagos in 1835, he found a world in which time had stood still. As Roger Lewin, an editor of Britain's New Scientist, reveals in Darwin's Forgotten World (Reed; $19.95), the clock is still stopped. Iguanas and other lizards, close relatives of the dinosaurs that have been extinct for millenniums, prowl the islands. Giant tortoises, resembling prehistoric tanks, lurch slowly along their beaches. Lewin, aided by Photographer Sally Anne Thompson, does his usual excellent job of showing what Darwin saw when he landed in this natural...
Since the publication more than a century ago of Darwin's The Descent of Man, scientists have become increasingly convinced that man shares a common ancestor with chimpanzees and gorillas. But who, or what, was that kindred beast? And when did the momentous split occur? At what point did primate evolution begin taking one route that led to the great apes of Africa, another to man? Paleontologists generally believe, on the basis of bits and pieces of fossils millions of years old, that the common ancestor may have been the small, long extinct apelike animal named Dryopithecus (from...
Guys and Dolls gently spoofs the pious. Bible-reading has more serious overtones in Inherit the Wind, by Lawrence and Lee. The play is based on the famous John Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a young schoolteacher was tried for teaching his science classes Darwin's theory of evolution--a practice forbidden by statute in his Bible-Belt state. The political orator William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow defended the teacher. Though the characters in Inherit the Wind are but thinly disguised, the playwrights have turned a sensationalistic trial into a lyrical clash between tradition...
Zuckerman also dissents from the Nobel emphasis on empirical discoveries as opposed to theoretical contributions. Says she: "Darwin's principles of evolution would probably not have qualified." Indeed, Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize citation made only a cautious reference to his theory of relativity, first published 16 years before he became a Nobel laureate in 1921, while emphasizing the empirical consequences of his work on the photoelectric effect-the basis for "electric eyes," television cameras and motion picture sound equipment...
...published, Bromhall found to his great surprise that the birth of the cloned boy had supposedly occurred five months before the date of Rorvik's letter. "If Rorvik's story were true," says Bromhall, "then by the time he wrote to me, he and 'the Darwin team' knew more about human cloning than anyone in the world. Then why did he ask my advice? The whole thing is so obviously untrue. We just must not allow this sort of hoax to pass...