Word: darwinists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there is dissent even within the "ultra-Darwinist" ranks. M.I.T. linguist Steven Pinker finds the ideas of memetics intriguing and occasionally even useful but doesn't quite believe it's a science. Nor does he accept the nest-of-memes view of consciousness. "To be honest, I don't even know what that means," admits Pinker. The problem, he says, is that memetics assumes the brain is essentially passive, like a Petri dish awaiting infection. It doesn't account for the self that responds subjectively, that feels sensations such as love, envy and pain. "Babies are conscious," he points...
...object of the class is to use one's ideas, words and oratory skills to hunt down and "kill" the ideas and words of others. There is a free-market competition of ideas at play in these classes which is directed and perpetuated by a kind of intellectually Darwinist atmosphere. Those equipped with the most extensive verbal weaponry, the thickest rebuttal armor, and the necessary obsession with intellectual combat are most likely to win. Aggressiveness and at times even aggression pay large dividends. At the end of the class, one or two hunters emerge triumphant, and his or her ideas...
...with each of his personal science heroes, from Darwin to Halley. A "Careful reading," Gould suggests, gives a new lease on life to theories ridiculed or scorned by today's haughty and careless scholars. In a seeming reversal of his desire to combat the complacent and traditional nature of Darwinist thought, Gould even goes as far as to suggest we need a mythology of science...
Mower is a prototype of Harvard's diversity. In one room alone, there is a preppie, a gov jock and an East Asian studies concentrator. We have agnostics, Communists, even a social Darwinist. Diversity is Mower's middle name...