Word: naturalist
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...drongo, and the mudskipper, a hippopotamus-shaped fish that likes to skitter across mud flats and climb mangrove roots? Or the mallee fowl, which assiduously builds an incubator for its eggs and keeps the temperature inside at a steady 95°, come rain or shine? Curious specimens these, but Naturalist Gerald Durrell is only reporting what he sees, and reporting it with grace and an infectious sense of wonderment...
Geneticist Bentley Glass incited the fuss last winter when he suggested that human bodies began balding as soon as warm clothes ended the need for tufted torsos. Scoffing, one writer charged Glass with Lamarckianism, the discredited 1809 theory of French Naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that giraffe necks grew long because the animals preferred eating treetop leaves and that such acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring. In rebuttal, Glass argued that man's use of fire as well as clothing changed his environment enough "to make hairiness an inconsequential feature, except on the more exposed parts...
...AGGRESSION, by Konrad Lorenz. In this fascinating natural history of violence, a celebrated Austrian naturalist traces the all-too-human passion of aggression to its roots in the lower phyla and finds there an inherent (and hopefully inherited) capacity to transform aggression into love...
...reminded himself. "I should live no more than I can record and leave nothing of myself hidden." A confessional impulse of such intensity was something new in English writing. "Boswell scanned the swarming variety in his own nature," says Pottle, "with the pleased detachment of a naturalist watching a sectioned anthill." But he also scanned life with a quick delighted eye. "I can tune myself so to the tone of any bearable man I am with," he wrote proudly, "that he is as much at freedom as with another self...
...rats that belong to their own colony, but two colonies of rats have been known to meet in a pitched battle that leaves hundreds of dead on the ground. These bloodbaths, Lorenz suggests, are epidemics of mass psychosis; they serve no rat-preserving purpose that he or any other naturalist can see. In general, he concludes ominously, a species is less often annihilated by its natural enemies than by its own mistakes...