Word: letting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to conventional wisdom, this evolutionary breakthrough came at a time when climate change was transforming eastern and southern Africa from dense forest into open grassland. Standing upright in such an environment could have offered our ancestors many advantages. It could have let them scan the horizon for predators, exposed less body surface to the scorching equatorial sun (and, conversely, more to the cooling wind) or freed their hands for carrying food...
Whoever did it, the creation of technology gave its inventors an astonishing advantage over other hominid species. Stone hammers and blades let them exploit carcasses left behind by other predators and permitted them to shift to an energy-rich, high-fat diet. "That," asserts Asfaw, "leads to all kinds of evolutionary consequences...
...necessarily have evolutionary consequences. Argues Wolpoff: "We're not going to [adapt to] the next ice age by changing our physical form. We'll set off an atom bomb or set up a space mirror or whatever [to control climate]." Manipulation of the human genome, meanwhile, will eventually let us change the basic characteristics of our species to order. Evolution by natural selection could be replaced, perhaps chillingly, with evolution by human intervention...
...excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery. Evolution is not a peripheral subject but the central organizing principle of all biological science. No one who has not read the Bible or the Bard can be considered educated in Western traditions; so no one ignorant of evolution can understand science...
...tinged Mod look is the scene in clubs around the country. Vintage scooter riders with a penchant for the Who, '60s soul and contemporary Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis are let into many of these clubs for free--it's good for the atmosphere. Piper Ferguson, a promoter at Hollywood's Cafe Bleu, says that on some nights as many as 100 twentysomethings--sporting shiny sharkskin suits, pointy Beatles boots and tattoos--line up their bikes in the club lot. But Vespa fanatics include businessmen, middle-aged women and just regular guys. Hairstylist Robert Winslow, 29, moved from...