Word: gradualism
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...Kauffman--philosopher, medical doctor, evolutionary biologist and entrepreneur--all these problems underscore a single phenomenon: complex, self-organizing systems continuously adapt to and change with their environments but do so in ways that are impossible to predict. It's a head scratcher. In a universe damned by entropy to gradual dissolution, things sure seem pretty well put together. So, how is it that evolving systems as diverse as the biosphere, your immune system or the global economy have grown from nothing into organizations of imponderable complexity...
Crunch he did. Small is reorganizing the Smithsonian from top to bottom, replacing its quasi-academic structure with a sleek, corporate-style hierarchy. He also launched an aggressive fund-raising campaign that netted $206.6 million last year. "I didn't come here to preside over a gradual decline," Small told TIME. "We need to bring the Smithsonian into the 21st century." He pulled off several very public--and costly--coups, including the rental of two Chinese pandas for $10 million and the acquisition of a George Washington portrait for $30 million...
...focus on the gradual progression from iconographical elements to a naturalist setting ultimately culminates into the Fogg Museum’s core acquisition for this exhibit—The “Sacra conversazione”(also known as “Virgin and Child with Saints”), a Venetian altarpiece by an unknown artist dating from 1515. The altarpiece depicts the Virgin and Child occupied in a sacred conversation with saints, a “sacra conversazione.” With the paintings soft colors and sense of space, its former attribution to Renaissance masters such as Bellini...
...foragers traded seal fat, amber, slate and flint for the farmers' pottery and grain. In coastal regions where oysters or other shellfish were plentiful, foragers felt no particular compulsion to take up the tasks of horticulture. Where farming did spread, he says, it was often through a process of gradual adoption by hunter-gatherers rather than continual migration of farmers. "Gene flow just doesn't correspond to the cultural patterns," he says...
...what? Well, it complicates matters, suggesting that gradual cultural exchange has played a quiet but constant role in human history - and that invasions aren't necessarily all they have been cracked up to be. Thirty years ago the dominant theory was that the precursor of the Indo-European languages came to Europe on the tongues of warrior horsemen from the Pontic steppes of present-day Ukraine, and that the broad dispersal of those languages across the Continent was a tribute to their martial success. Then in 1987 Renfrew made a powerful case that it was the Neolithic farmers who brought...