Word: precursor
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...elite, not in terms of their wealth or social status, but in terms of their accomplishments. At the Same time, a Harvard education is no guarantee of success. While it's true that a lot more of them are not. Even the best possible education is only a precursor to all that follows; just because one person attends Harvard and another attends Podunk U. doesn't mean that the former will necessarily contribute more to society than the latter...
...poverty by way of the London music halls, giving innocent performances of suggestive songs: I Don't Suppose He'll Do It Again for Months and Months and Months; Don't Stick It Out So Much. Under the tutelage of Dan Leno, London's most beloved comedian and a precursor of Charlie Chaplin, Lizzie became a star and eventually married the newly rich John Cree. In Ackroyd's opening chapter, she is shown being hanged for murdering her husband...
Oakhurst, which has a congregation that is roughly half black and half white, is what diversity is all about: people of different races coming together not in the mournful, candle-bearing aftermath of some urban riot or the artificially arranged precursor to some political photo op, but because they want to be together. Things in America tend toward being all one thing or all the other. Schools, parties, circles of friends, television sitcoms are often mostly or entirely white or mostly or entirely black. It's especially rare to see a church that is racially mixed with such equanimity...
...books written by people who have spent a few years (or in some cases a few decades) in cyberspace and know whereof they speak. One of them is Clifford Stoll-a gangly, wild-haired astronomer who got his first modem in 1971 and jacked it into the Internet's precursor, the Arpanet. His 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg, which told how he used the Net to trap some German hacker spies, was the first Internet-related best seller. How does he feel now about the place he helped popularize...
...team replaced eyeless with a gene that controls eye development in mice, they found that the mouse gene also produced flies with multiple eyes. The implication was inescapable: the mammalian gene and the fly gene are so closely related that they are almost certainly derived from a precursor gene in a common ancestor--quite possibly some sort of sea-dwelling worm that lived 500 million or so years ago. "What does this mean?" asks molecular biologist Charles Zuker, of the Howard Hughes Institute in San Diego, with a half smile. "It means that we are basically just big flies...