Word: fittest
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...Harvard vision of success seemed to be a combination of raw talent and a survival-of-the-fittest environment, where competition and natural selection would weed out the weak and where the strong would rise to the top--the products of a rigorous distillation of ability into a narrowly-defined conception of achievement. Harvard was great because of its Nobel laureates and its alumni heads of state, because it filled corporate boardrooms and seats in Congress. Its dominance of this type of accomplishment seemed enchanted. Good people came to Harvard to be challenged and proven against the mettle...
More intriguing, though, in the long run, are Maes' experiments with genetic programming--a software version of survival of the fittest. In one program designed to help users sort their E-mail, Maes let slightly different agents compete for the user's approval; the most favored were allowed to "mate" and pass their "genetic code" on to the next generation. More than just a whimsical mimicry of living processes, the tactic may actually be, in Maes' view, the only way for agents to keep pace with people's rapidly changing tastes in a network like the Internet. "In my vision...
...entire sidewalk was covered in a slippery, uneven coating of ice. The last snowfall had been several weeks previous and apparently no attempt had been made to clear or even salt the sidewalks in the general vicinity of the river houses. Under these conditions, it's survival of the fittest...
...What on earth has happened to those nice, compassionate Canadians? ... [Is this] the end of Canada's reputation for civility, tolerance and compromise? Are Canadians acquiring some of the survival-of-the-fittest traits for which they so often lambaste their American neighbors?" --The Boston Globe's misguided Bernard Simon, commenting on various levels of Canadian government cutbacks to control the national deficit
YOUR ARTICLE STRENGTHENS A BELIEF I have long held, that human beings are a singularly vicious, selfish and shortsighted species whose status as rulers of the world seems to contradict Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. Continued disregard of the planet we live on will surely cause us to be "naturally selected'' right out of the picture. SCOTT KNUDSEN New York City