Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...risk of shaping a much more homogeneous community around certain dominant values, a far more engineered community." What sort of lottery would decide who is to leap ahead, who is to be held back for an overall balance? At the moment, nature orchestrates our diversity. But human nature resists leaving so much to chance, if there is actually a choice...
...excellent and provocative study of Joe Tsien and his colleagues will, one may safely predict, be widely misread in the false light of this age-old hope--combined with some equally age-old fallacies of human reasoning...
Pundits in our age of rapid misinformation will surely transmit the story as a claim that the gene for intelligence has been cloned and that a human smart pill for routine production of kiddie geniuses lies just around the millennial corner. None of this punditry, however, will bear any relationship to current realities or reasonable prospects for the short-term future. Even so, the mice studied by Tsien et al. could help us correct two common errors in our thinking about genetics and intelligence...
...right thumb. The very notion of a gene "for" something as complex as "intelligence" lapses into absurdity. Intelligence is an array of largely independent and socially defined mental attributes, not a measure of a single something, secreted by one gene, measurable as one number and capable of arranging human diversity into one line ordered by relative mental worth...
Welcome to the strange world of body modification, or "bod-mod," in which the human form serves as a personal canvas to be cut, poked, burned, stretched and adorned. It's a world in which terms like journey and enlightenment are used to describe acts of self-mutilation that would make even Quentin Tarantino cringe, a subculture combining tribal spirituality with kinky sex and a dash of circus sideshow. It may seem weird, but it has a long tradition: in November the American Museum of Natural History in New York City will present "Body Art: Marks of Identity," an exhibition...