Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...upper-class strata of WALL•E. And not to forget the bereft father, twisted by family tragedy, from last week's Law Abiding Citizen. "If you lose your son like this," a fellow scientist tells Dr. Tenma, "and you don't go crazy, you're not a human being." Tenma doesn't plot the ingenious murders of everyone in Metro City, the way the father does in Law Abiding Citizen; he simply, and more plausibly, averts his heart from the child he has created, because this Toby is so close to the real Toby as to be both painful...
Other recent genetic research has backed up that notion. One study, published in PNAS in 2007 and led by John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that some 1,800 human gene variations had become widespread in recent generations because of their modern-day evolutionary benefits. Among those genetic changes, discovered by examining more than 3 million DNA variants in 269 individuals: mutations that allow people to digest milk or resist malaria and others that govern brain development. (Watch TIME's video "Darwin and Lincoln: Birthdays and Evolution...
Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist at University College London who has previously held that human evolution was nearing its end, says the Framingham study is indeed an important example of how natural selection still operates through inherited differences in reproductive ability. But Jones argues that variation in female fertility - as measured in the Framingham study - is a much less important factor in human evolution than differences in male fertility. Sperm hold a much higher chance of carrying an error or mutation than an egg, especially among older men. "While it used to be that men had many children in older...
Despite evidence that human evolution still functions, biologists concede that it's anyone's guess where it will take us from here. Artificial selection in the form of genetic medicine could push natural selection into obsolescence, but a lethal pandemic or other cataclysm could suddenly make natural selection central to the future of the species. Whatever happens, Jones says, it is worth remembering that Darwin's beautiful theory has suffered a long history of abuse. The bastard science of eugenics, he says, will haunt humanity as long as people are tempted to confuse evolution with improvement. "Uniquely in the living...
These days, Roth is about as prolific as he is grim. His most recent novels have all dealt in almost expository detail with the subject of death and its inextricability from the spectrum of human experience. “The Humbling,” with its three-act structure and its otherwise bare narrative that alternates predominantly between dialogue with Axler and his inner-monologue, could essentially serve as an allegory for Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The entirety of the novel, from Axler’s time...