Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...truth was brutally confirmed the following year in Dallas. Life is unfair. Kennedy was talking about citizens' military obligations, about the restive Army reservists who were being held on active duty even after the Berlin crisis had subsided. Now Jimmy Carter has brought up the unfairness doctrine to explain his policy on abortion. Somehow the dictum comes out this time with a mean-spirited edge, like something from the lips of Dickens' Mr. Podsnap...
...sociobiology did not arise from molecular studies but as an answer to a century-old gap in Darwinian theory: Darwin could not fully explain why some organisms help other members of their species. His theory held that every organism fights for its own survival and chance to reproduce, not that of others. Since altruistic behavior reduces an organism's chances to survive, evolution should be expected to breed it out of all species. Still, some birds risk their lives for the flock by crying out to warn of the presence of a predator?thus chancing attracting the attention...
Still, there are problems in explaining all altruism as a direct investment in one's own genes. For example, some birds give warning cries for the flock even when their young and close relatives are absent. Trivers proposed a solution in a 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism that has become a central text for sociobiologists. "In other organisms," Trivers wrote, "the evidence that altruism is genetic is rather overwhelming. It is therefore irrational to argue that the first species in which altruism has no genetic contribution is human beings." Using game theory, he concluded that natural selection produces individuals that...
...Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world...
Once this stage was reached, the fourth step came quickly. Realizing that impressing their shapes on the bullae made enclosing the tokens unnecessary, people abandoned the counters and began keeping their records directly on clay tablets. The efficiency of that technique was immediately obvious, says Schmandt-Besserat, and could explain not only how written record keeping evolved but also why writing spread so rapidly along the trade routes and quickly took hold throughout the civilized world of that day. But even the development of writing did not lead to the disappearance of the tokens. The written word, after all, helps...