Word: fossilize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with geological slowness, as Darwin has insisted, but in abrupt fits and starts, interspersed with long periods of no change in species" has put him at odds with the prevailing Darwinian doctrine. Gould's thesis is simply a way of getting around the absence of the necessary fossil record. In fact, evolution, whether through "geological slowness" or "fits and starts," remains a flawed explanation for all of existence...
...Piltdown man forgery. Gould's accusation, however, has not been accepted by experts. J.S. Weiner, who first uncovered the hoax and then the hoaxer, dismissed Gould's account as worthless. British Scholar Kenneth Oakley, who originally supported Gould's contention that Teilhard faked the Piltdown fossil as part of a youthful prank, later changed his mind. After being shown evidence that contradicted Gould, Oakley declared that the basis of Gould's charge against Teilhard "has now been proved to be completely untrue...
...should the layman be interested in so esoteric a subject as evolutionary biology? It is a question that Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has heard before. But as he sits in his cluttered office, amid the assorted books, charts and fossil remains that are the very sinew of his profession, he smiles tolerantly. "Why?" he asks. "Because it tells us where we came from, how we got here, and perhaps where we are going. Quite simply, it is science's version of Roots, except it is the story...
...notes, "small items with big implications are my bread and butter." A confessed iconoclast, he likes nothing better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections...
...million in 1983. It is the only area outside the defense budget where an increase is planned. The money is beginning to produce results. New research in the U.S. and West Germany strongly suggests that acid rain combines with traces of toxic metals emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning plants to leach away nutrients that sustain trees. In addition, scientists believe the mixture of acid rain and aluminum trace elements in the soil is absorbed by roots and can choke off a tree's water supply...