Word: randomly
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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FLASHBACKS: ON RETURNING TO VIETNAM by Morley Safer (Random House; $18.95). Visiting old battlegrounds and interviewing old soldiers, the veteran CBS correspondent reminds us of a time when the typewriter, not the portable hair dryer, was the essential tool of the TV journalist...
...Only in the sense that every species is. Since evolution has no inherent or predictable direction, if you could play life's tape again from any early point, you would get a completely different result that wouldn't include human beings. In that sense, every species' appearance is not random, because after it happens it is perfectly explainable, but it's unpredictable. The reason I call humans even more of an afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and so small. The splitting point between human ancestors and those that gave rise to chimps and gorillas...
...movie Doc Brown goes to a blackboard and draws a chart. The top line is history as it actually occurred. But if you make this teeny little change, which is Biff Tannen getting that sports almanac, then history veers off. It isn't that it is random that it happened the second way. You see, people mistakenly think that my book Wonderful Life is a claim that evolution is random, totally chaotic and unexplainable. That is not what historical explanation holds. It holds that what actually happened makes sense. It's just that what actually happened...
...Random House; 206 pages...
...Department is afraid of unevenly taxing its faculty as student interest fluctuates from year to year. As students have of late gravitated en masse towards American government, for example, faculty specialists in this field have had their hands full. Obviously, faculty hiring could never keep pace with random shifts in student interest. But if the department finds a particular subfield oversubscribed one year, excising the 25 or so lowest-ranked students--only a handful of whose theses would be in the oversubscribed field--is cruel and unusual punishment...