Word: planarians
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...publishing schedule. The wordless plots are simple and archetypal, tapping into primal-process stories of food, fear and friendship. "Frank's High Horse," the lead story that continues across issues, involves Frank's finding a vicious protector called the High Horse (though it looks more like a giant, floating planarian worm). Soon Frank becomes addicted to the power this brings him, desperately following it as it slips through a slit in the sky, back to its own plane of existence...
...born in Yugoslavia who spent many years in a Chinese Buddhist monastery and now lives at Lake Como, seems never to have heard of Lamarckian biology, T.D. Lysenko's bogus theory that Communism could be inherited as an acquired characteristic, or even about the lowly planarian worms, which were forced to cannibalize their siblings in hope that their modest laboratory lessons would be passed on to future generations...
Proud of It. The original choice of title was not made lightly, says Psychologist-Editor James McConnell, who heads the University of Michigan planarian (flatworm) research group, which publishes the W.R.D, "In psychological jargon," he explains, "those who experiment with rats are called 'rat runners,' and those who work with insects are called 'bug runners.' So we are 'worm runners'-and we're proud of it." Not enough scientists dig McConnell's logic-or humor. Some will not publish their work in a journal with so frivolous a name. Editors of other...
Such acceptance, to be sure, has already been earned. A 1961 W.R.D. article by McConnell's students was the first to report that memory could be inherited by one planarian from another; it started the current controversy about the role of the RNA molecule in the transfer of memory and learning. The Digest later published the first complete account of the original study of memory transfer in a higher animal, the rat. It also reported the first study of behavioral changes in plants-experiments in which the tropical mimosa was actually "taught" to change its response to specific stimuli...
Ardrey wants to adjourn the biological debate by accepting the territorial principle as a key to the understanding of man and as a solution to all his behavior problems. Why does the Russian collective farmer only listlessly till state soil? Because, says Ardrey, the dispossessed planarian worm lost his zest for life and slipped this attitude into the evolutionary stream untold millions of years...