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...beginning of Creation, we're promised the movie will reveal how Charles Darwin came to write The Origin of Species. Unfortunately, we don't get to set sail on The Beagle, but in a literal sense the movie does deliver, in that we do get to see Darwin (Paul Bettany) repeatedly sit down at his desk and move a pen across paper. Eventually, we see him drop a fat parcel in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, sending his Origin manuscript off to his publisher...
...Neglected Son No. 2 and the Other Daughter. The movie implies that Annie's death made it possible, in an odd way, for Darwin to write the book, his faith in God having been so jeopardized by the unfairness of her death. (Annie died in 1851; Origin was published...
...cocaine seized in the U.S., up from 30% in 2008. Unlike most cuts - usually inert or relatively harmless substances like the B vitamin inositol, which are added by lower-level dealers looking to stretch supplies - levamisole appears to be added to cocaine from the outset, in the countries of origin. The substance has been found in various concentrations in cocaine analyzed in countries around the world, from Switzerland to Australia. And urine tests of cocaine users attending a drug clinic at San Francisco General Hospital in 2009 - one floor above Graf's office - found that 90% of samples were positive...
...victim - the client fish often swims away after being nibbled by the female, and the male wrasse loses his chance for lunch. This rationale, over the course of evolutionary eras, could have led to human society's more diffuse arrangements for punishment. "What we might be seeing is the origin of third-party punishment in human evolutionary history," Bshary says. The line connecting the male wrasse to our criminal courts may be a long and meandering one, but that doesn't mean it's not real...
What's more, any such effects of nurture (environment) on a species' nature (genes) were not supposed to happen so quickly. Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species celebrated its 150th anniversary in November, taught us that evolutionary changes take place over many generations and through millions of years of natural selection. But Bygren and other scientists have now amassed historical evidence suggesting that powerful environmental conditions (near death from starvation, for instance) can somehow leave an imprint on the genetic material in eggs and sperm. These genetic imprints can short-circuit evolution and pass along new traits...