Word: minnesota
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Brooklyn Dodgers, named for the difficulty of evading trolley cars in the famous borough, are now the Los Angeles Dodgers, where evading mayhem on the freeways is equally hard. The name Los Angeles Lakers, however, makes no sense at all, though it did when the team was in Minnesota. Utah, with its Mormon tradition, could easily have accepted the New Orleans football team (the Saints, as in Latter-Day Saints and saints who go marching in). Instead it got the New Orleans basketball team, now known as the Utah Jazz, which makes about as much sense as the New Orleans...
...intimate of functions, might become one more branch of private enterprise, some experts want surrogacy to be conducted like adoption, mostly through nonprofit agencies. "I do not think people should be gestating babies for money," says Arthur Caplan, director of the Bio-Medical Ethics Center at the University of Minnesota. "Entrepreneurs who come into the business are not being screened...
...project, summed up in a scholarly paper that has been submitted to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is considered the most comprehensive of its kind. The Minnesota researchers report the results of six-day tests of their subjects, including 44 pairs of identical twins who were brought up apart. Well-being, alienation, aggression and the shunning of risk or danger were found to owe as much or more to nature as to nurture. Of eleven key traits or clusters of traits analyzed in the study, researchers estimated that a high of 61% of what they call "social potency...
Psychologist David Lykken, one of the Minnesota researchers, thinks the study will shove the pendulum further away from the "radical environmentalism" of those who believe the characters of children are more or less created by their parents and environment. Lykken says Test Pilot Chuck Yeager is daring because he was "genetically endowed with a low scale of fearlessness," a trait that might have been redirected or tamped down but not eradicated. Says Psychologist Nancy Segal, a member of the project: "Parents can work to make a child less fearful, but they can't make that child brave...
Some scholars, such as Princeton Psychologist Leon Kamin, fear that the Minnesota results will be used to blame the poor and downtrodden for their own condition. Political liberals have long believed that crime and poverty are largely by-products of destructive environments. As a result, they are usually suspicious of biological or genetic explanations for behavior. "These are very ambiguous data that can be interpreted any way you want to," says Kamin. "I'm not saying that anyone is falsifying facts or anything, just that we really know very, very little." For the Minnesota researchers and their allies, however, their...