Word: darwins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, often called the “Darwin of the 20th century,” died last Thursday at his retirement community in Bedford, Mass...
DIED. ERNST MAYR, 100, leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century; in Bedford, Mass. Born in Germany, he became an avid bird watcher and turned away from a planned medical career to natural history. In the 1930s and '40s, he integrated the newly emerging field of genetics with Darwin's insights on evolution, showing how species arise when groups of similar organisms become separated--often by geography--and then accumulate genetic differences that no longer allow them to interbreed...
...President--a dispute that dates back to the celebrated 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" is being replayed around the country in legislatures, courts, school-board meetings and parent-teacher conferences. School administrators in rural Dover, Pa., visited biology classes last week to read a declaration proclaiming, among other things, that "Darwin's theory [of evolution] ... is a theory, not a fact." And in suburban Cobb County, Ga., officials pasted stickers on biology textbooks declaring the same thing and are now appealing a court order to remove them...
...intellectual underpinnings of the latest assault on Darwin's theory come not from Bible-wielding Fundamentalists but from well-funded think tanks promoting a theory they call intelligent design, or I.D. for short. Their basic argument is that the origin of life, the diversity of species and even the structure of organs like the eye are so bewilderingly complex that they can only be the handiwork of a higher intelligence (name and nature unspecified...
Kansas is a key flashpoint in this struggle. Back in 1999, a conservative state school board attempted to downplay the importance of Darwinism by removing from the required statewide science curriculum references to dinosaurs, the geological time line and other central tenets of the theory. Evolution, they argued, is "just a theory" and should not be favored over other theories, such as I.D. In the next election, Kansas voters gave moderates an edge on the school board, which promptly dropped the effort to revise the curriculum. In the 2004 election, however, conservatives retook the board, and while a curriculum advisory...