Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Watson drifted from pure science into administration. As director of the molecular-biology lab at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., he turned it into a scientific powerhouse. He also served as head of the Human Genome Project, absorbing some fallout from the high-energy ethical debates whose fuse he and Crick had lighted nearly four decades earlier...
...Frenchman, the psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others...
...testing has its roots in a theory of intelligence--part science, part sociology--that developed in the late 19th century, before Binet's work and entirely separate from it. Championed first by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, it held that intelligence was the most valuable human attribute, and that if people who had a lot of it could be identified and put in leadership positions, all of society would benefit...
What we've decided now is that we'll identify, assess and honor a much wider range of human abilities than just whatever it is that IQ tests measure. That's the theory. The practice is that IQ testing--cheap, consistent and established--is still ubiquitous. Even the attempts to supplant it pay IQ the tribute of accepting its frame of reference. We have got used to trying to understand what goes on inside people's head in terms of "intelligences" and "quotients," and there doesn't seem to be any way to put that particular horse back...
...saga of the techno-sublime is about power, speed and transcendence of human limits. Ray guns, starships, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, nanotechnology--all beloved of SF, and every last one of them a big Technicolor disruption of the mundane...