Word: trait
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a crucial trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation. Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn't risked dying out in chaos and killing. The evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful...
...received a more intriguing going-over than in the recently published book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (Doubleday; 256 pages), by molecular biologist Dean Hamer. Chief of gene structure at the National Cancer Institute, Hamer not only claims that human spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer's work, may be due to little more...
...felonies, involving style and volume more than substance. The President has spent more than $100 million in negative advertising against Kerry, and almost all of it has been within the bounds of standard political practice. Some has been quite brilliant: the "flip-flop" assault inflated Kerry's most annoying trait--his nuance-addled hedging of political bets--into a defining character flaw. That was fair, as was the dreadful broadside of ads taking isolated Kerry votes--98 times, allegedly, for higher taxes--and telescoping them into an ideological pattern. Negative advertising is like humor. Selective exaggeration is standard...
Because the baser tendency of self-centeredness is a trait to be overcome by the greater jihad, one who engages in this jihad is concerned not only with perfecting himself, but also with perfecting the world. Just as one must wage jihad to mold oneself into a form with which God would be pleased, one must also wage jihad to mold the world into such a form. Islamic scholar Mahmud Taleqani says that in religious texts, “the term jihad is always attached to the locution ‘fi sabil ilah...
There aren’t many places where a weak, lanky Jew boy whose defining athletic trait is the difficulty he has lifting his arms over his head can live out dreams of football stardom he never even imagined he had. But in the topsy-turvy world of Scottish-American football, anything can happen (that’s American football--—where there are quarterbacks, not goalies-—played in Scotland...