Word: novelness
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...alien entity, that dates back to Philip K. Dick's 1954 story "The Father-Thing," in which an eight-year-old suspects that his father's not quite right and finds a menacing replicant in the garage. A year later, Jack Finney fleshed out the premise in his novel The Body Snatchers, the source for the 1956 Invasion of... movie version and its three remakes. Alex Garland's script for 28 Days Later..., in 2002, blamed the plague on a virus injected into monkeys. In The Happening, two summers ago, M. Night Shyamalan reprised Romero's Crazies concept, except that...
...scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values - that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology...
Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if - or maybe especially if - those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped...
...Your new novel centers around a dying mathematician and his family, as the Greek gods hover above. What sort of statement, if any, does this make about religion and science...
...biomedical treatments McCarthy espouses - and it is hard to find a controversial, novel or alternative treatment that McCarthy doesn't say has some merit - are often decried by mainstream pediatricians and other physicians and as being untested or unproven. Yet it is rare to find a family struggling with an autistic child that hasn't tried at least some version of one of them. While every illness brings forth unproven treatments, autism, because there has been so little progress in terms of finding a cause, much less a proven cure, has been a field replete with controversial therapies that lure...