Word: progenitor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Nameless Progenitor. Dr. Calvin sees chemical evolution fairly clearly up to DNA, but he cannot say just when the spark of life appeared. The best test of life is that the organism can make replicas of itself, taking as building materials the simpler molecules in the medium around it. The first organism to pass this divide between the living and the inert may have been a single complex molecule or a large cluster of them. This tiny, nameless primogenitor of all living matter may have used some primitive kind of photosynthesis to reproduce itself. Or perhaps it merely picked...
...faced. The regal lion she equates both with the sun and man's consciousness, as well as with "the will to power, stemming from ego, pride . . . destructive forces to be faced, overcome, transmuted." The powerful, majestic bull she sees as lunar, the great progenitor who nonetheless partakes of the dark unconscious and "the lower material aspects ... to be sacrificed, conquered, outgrown ... so that the positive, creative energies may be released." The reason Theseus had to search out and slay the half-bull, half-human Minotaur in the labyrinth, she suggests, is that the beast represents the "misused powers...
Robert Frost (Caedmon) proves a happy exception to the rule that poets cannot read their own works as well as actors. Frost's cracked voice often sounds like that of the first progenitor of mankind, and his lucid verse sings of subjects appropriate to that early time - the whisper of a scythe in grass, the stumbling of a spindle-legged calf, the rains of autumn...
...Asphalt Jungle cannot quite be considered a period piece because it hasn't been left amoulding in the MGM morgue long enough. Its interest lies, rather, as an antecedent to the Dragnet-type thriller. The tender first steps of that animal are unsteady and grouping; but as progenitor of a brood of offspring, its technical effects are interesting to watch in evolution...
Coleman Hawkins & His All-Stars (Concert Hall LP). Tenorman Hawkins is one of the alltime master hot improvisers, a willy-nilly progenitor of the bellowing excesses that mark today's rock-'n-roll craze (TIME, April 4). This record shows that Hawkins' swooping insinuations, his ever-building arabesques, his brash, driving rhythms have withered little with the years...