Word: descent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instrumental in Hamer's decision to switch fields was Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. "I was fascinated to learn that Darwin seemed so convinced that behavior was partially inherited," he remembers, "even though when he was writing, genes had not been discovered, let alone DNA." Homosexual behavior, in particular, seemed ripe for exploration because few scientists had dared tackle such an emotionally and politically charged subject. "I'm gay," Hamer says with a shrug, "but that was not a major motivation. It was more of a question of intellectual curiosity...
...horrors of slavery, remarking in his syndicated column that "America deserves better than to have Clinton romping around sub-Saharan Africa, counting cheap graces by apologizing for sins this nation never committed." What's more, Buchanan believes that since his own ancestors never owned slaves, and--being of Irish descent, were persecuted themselves--he should be absolved from the crime of slavery...
...could be brought on board through approaches that don't address race head on--have deflated. At Berkeley minority admissions have plummeted. Of the 10,509 applicants who were offered a slot this year, only 2.4% are African American, down from 5.6% a year ago. Chicano students of Mexican descent, about 11% of the applicants accepted in 1997, made up just 6% this year. Taken together, African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos of all backgrounds, who constitute about 34% of the state's population, account for just a tenth of this year's admissions. Berkeley admissions director Bob Laird argues...
...Russian/Polish descent, I am in real life the other kind, which is the character that I'm portraying in this play, and I think this character is a lot more eloquent and rooted in who he is and how his religion influences his life, maybe a little more than...
...father and Francie himself in the film's last scene) in the wryly humorous tone of a man looking back self-indulgently on a mischievous boyhood that came out all right in the end. But the personal history he recounts includes hugely destructive vandalism, arson, murder and a descent into decades of madness. The latter encompasses visions of the Virgin Mary (Sinead O'Connor, no less) appearing to him looking like a gaudy lithograph and behaving like a seductress; of priests looming up as giant science-fiction insects; and of his town's being destroyed by The Bomb, which incidentally...