Word: humanism
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Paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson is the man who found the woman that shook up our family tree. In 1974, Johanson discovered a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of a female skeleton in Ethiopia that would forever change our understanding of human origins. Dubbed Australopithecus afarensis, she became known to the world as Lucy. In the years since, Johanson and his colleagues have unearthed a total of 363 specimens of Australopithecus afarensis that span 400,000 years. His new book, Lucy's legacy: The Quest for Human Origins picks up where his 1981 New York Times bestseller, Lucy: The Beginning...
...jargon-free as you can manage to articulate, how did Lucy revolutionize the study of human origins? Why, by being found after being missing for 2.3 million years [Laughs]. Lucy is still a terribly important discovery all these years later. She appeared at just the right time, I think, in terms of paleoanthropology, in the sense that we had very few fossils beyond three million years old at that point. Most of the evidence for human evolution older than three million years, you could fit in the palm of your hand. One of the major things she did was open...
...Lucy's an international celebrity; she's toured museums as a good-will ambassador. As a spokeswoman for human evolution, what does she say? Well I think the major message she brings to all the people who have an opportunity to see her or understand who she was is that the evidence for human evolution is irrefutable. She broadcasts that loud and clear. And not only Lucy, but many of the other fossils that have been found since, that we are all united by our past, that we all have a common history and though we may be vastly different...
...select group who knows enough to make health reform happen this year. Her position, which is informally called White House health czar, was originally created as an add-on title for former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, who had to withdraw from consideration for Health and Human Services Secretary because of tax problems. But with Daschle out, the White House decided that it still needed a high-level coordinator for the reform effort. "It's good to have someone who is really riding herd and only thinking of one thing," said one White House official...
...prognosticators are correct, the International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue its first arrest warrant for a sitting head of state on Wednesday afternoon. That's when the court will announce whether Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir ought to stand trial on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his alleged role in orchestrating the Darfur conflict. Regardless of what one makes of the idea of international justice, an arrest warrant would be a historic move that many human-rights experts believe will further erode that sense of impunity shared by dictators the world over...