Word: darwin
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Ancient Lure. The musk deer's scent gland, according to Charles Darwin, is the product of an evolutionary runaround. Millions of years ago, the male, deer that smelled the nicest attracted the most females-and thus left the most descendants. A weakly scented male got nowhere as a progenitor...
...when the great, grave, bearded Charles Darwin was a bubbling young naturalist, he began his famous voyage on the Beagle. While crossing the South Pacific, he was fascinated by the ring-shaped coral islands, which he decided to call "by their Indian name of atolls." He wondered about those saucers of coral standing on steep-sided platforms above the deep ocean floor. Why their ring shape? How had they been formed? It was known that reef-building corals did not thrive more than a few fathoms below the surface. Certainly the islands had not grown upward from the depths...
...Darwin's atoll theory won fairly wide acceptance, but it was not checked conclusively until the Navy decided to explode two atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll last year. During the preliminary survey, scientists mapped the underground structure of the atoll by seismic methods: 126 depth charges exploded at various points on the bottom of the lagoon sent waves through the coral and underlying material. The denser the medium, the faster such waves travel. By measuring how long the waves took to reach listening instruments, the Navy's scientists could estimate the density of the rock at various depths...
...might be the hard core of a volcano or peak formed by above-sea erosion. Only deep drilling could give the details. But the mountain was there, far below the growing zone of coral. Darwin, from the deck of his windjammer, had guessed right...
...last week Woolner's poetry and sculpture (including his first triumph, Eleanor Sucking the Poison from the Arm of Prince Edward*} were mostly forgotten, but officials of the parish church at Hadleigh, Suffolk, still remembered his reply to Darwin and its implication of rather thoroughgoing research. They turned down a memorial offered by Woolner's aging daughters, because "any man who is asked to do things like that is not suitable to be commemorated in a church tablet." To clear his parish of any possible suspicion of complicity, Churchwarden W. Jones told the consistory court at Bury...