Word: darwins
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...believes children should pray in public schools. He believes women should be denied the right to terminate their pregnancy. He believes that military superiority should be our goal. Ronald Reagan's vision of the future is a cross between Pollyanna and Darwin...
...Thucydides, the pathbreaking Greek historians. He demonstrates such courage and self-denial: The Discoverers is chock-full of particulars and laced with sobering facts. We see how the botanist Linnaeus originated the idea of species by looking at the sex organs of plants (and how he inspired Charles Darwin's grandfather to write lyric poems about plants' amours). We learn how fastidious anatomists preserved for centuries their ignorance about the true form of the human body by relegating the unsavory dissection to barber-surgeons, while they read about the body in books...
...that Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was rejected by an editor who urged him instead to write a book about pigeons? ("Everyone is interested in pigeons," said this expert. "The book would be reviewed by every journal in the kingdom...
...Spiritualists, British Journalist Ruth Brandon takes a narrow-eyed view of an obsession that haunted 19th and early 20th century life. As she cannily observes, Darwin's legacy of doubt had weakened the moral underpinnings of Victorian and American society. But it had merely replaced religious faith with another dogma: the authority of Science. New believers turned to evidence of the world beyond the senses, "proof given by mediums who could communicate with the dead, make ectoplasm appear in darkened chambers and order inanimate objects to move at will. Katherine and Margaretta Fox of Arcadia, N.Y., were the superstars...
...unraveling of the DNA double helix was one of the great events in science, comparable to the splitting of the atom or the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It also marked the maturation of a bold new science: molecular biology. Under this probing discipline, man could at last explore-and understand-living things at their most fundamental level: that of their atoms and molecules...