Word: darwins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While S.S.E. members know that scorn doesn't prove that a controversial idea is right (people laughed at Darwin, after all, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown), it doesn't prove an idea is wrong, either. "What we do," says Nelson, "is give everyone a respectful hearing. If we think a speaker is doing bad science, we consider it our duty to criticize it. We get our share of lunatics, but they don't hang around long...
...islands of the Maldives--little circles and half-moons of platinum sand--seem as fragile as they are exquisite. To see them is to marvel--as Charles Darwin did--that they did not long ago succumb to "the all-powerful and never-tiring waves." But as Darwin went on to explain, these islands are more substantial than they seem. They are in fact the visible crests of massive limestone reefs that extend from the sea floor to the surface. The limestone is made of the consolidated skeletons of tiny marine organisms, including untold generations of coral polyps that millions...
...monumental bore. Gaseous generalizations and crackpot theories pour forth Like beer at an Oktoberfest. He thrills to something called the Odic force, "power rays" that flow from healthy bodies. He invokes Einstein's mathematics to justify his own mystical yearnings and "inner vibrations." He attempts to cross socialism with Darwin. He sees Jews as both "economic liberalists" and the organizers of the Soviet Comintern. Then, without a hint of irony or self-doubt, he projects his own faults on intellectuals: "seldom more than a bunch of diseased brains who toss scraps of disconnected and purely synthetically amassed knowledge in dialectically...
...presence has abetted, if not exclusively accounted for, much of what is nerve-racking and unsatisfactory in the world: a feeling of dislocation; aimlessness; loneliness; dim perceptions of unidentified dangers. Once the Bomb was used and the enormity of its effects realized, it had the impact of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud--of any monumental historical theory that proved, fundamentally, how small people are, how accidental their prominence, how subject to external manipulation. When the Bomb dropped, people not only saw a weapon that could boil the planet and create a death-in-life; they saw yet one more proof of their...
After receiving his doctorate, he embarked on research expeditions through New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, where he was able to prove what Darwin did not—that new species arise from the geographical isolation of populations. This led to his definition of species as “an interbreeding population that cannot breed with other groups,” the press release said...