Word: sudden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Indeed, while most people cling to the notion that evolution works its magic over millions of years, scientists are realizing that biological change often occurs in sudden fits and starts. And none of those fitful starts was more dramatic, more productive or more mysterious than the one that occurred shortly after Erwin's wormlike creature slithered through the primordial seas. All around the world, in layers of rock just slightly younger than that Erwin discovered, scientists have found the mineralized remains of organisms that represent the emergence of nearly every major branch in the zoological tree. Among them: bristle worms...
Over the decades, evolutionary theorists beginning with Charles Darwin have tried to argue that the appearance of multicelled animals during the Cambrian merely seemed sudden, and in fact had been preceded by a lengthy period of evolution for which the geological record was missing. But this explanation, while it patched over a hole in an otherwise masterly theory, now seems increasingly unsatisfactory. Since 1987, discoveries of major fossil beds in Greenland, in China, in Siberia, and now in Namibia have shown that the period of biological innovation occurred at virtually the same instant in geologic time all around the world...
...radical advance? Was it something in the organisms themselves or the environment in which they lived? Today an unprecedented effort to answer these questions is under way. Geologists and geochemists are reconstructing the Precambrian planet, looking for changes in the atmosphere and ocean that might have put evolution into sudden overdrive. Developmental biologists are teasing apart the genetic toolbox needed to assemble animals as disparate as worms and flies, mice and fish. And paleontologists are exploring deeper reaches of the fossil record, searching for organisms that might have primed the evolutionary pump. "We're getting data," says Harvard University paleontologist...
...misery, Harvard has not won a non-league overtime contest since its thrilling 4-3 win over UNH in the Crimson's 1989 national championship season. Last Tuesday night's game against UNH would have been a fitting time for the Crimson to break its horrific sudden death losing streak. However, that hope was dashed in the opening seconds of that overtime...
...days, they say in their voice-over narration (of which there is far too much), the place was to wiseguys what "Lourdes was to hunchbacks and cripples," a holy ground where organized crime was free to practice its amoral rites and where that miracle cure for the terminally outcast--sudden, improbable wealth--was always a real possibility. There's something a little too easy in this conceit, although there's good black comedy in it too--especially in the notion that it is the tragic flaw of hubris that eventually robs Sam and Nicky of their place in paradise...