Events

Up to 1900
 474 - Zeno crowned as co-Emperor of the Byzantine Empire.
 1555 - Bishop of Gloucester John Hooper is burned at the stake.
 1621 – Gregory XV becomes Pope.
 1775 - American Revolutionary War: The British Parliament declares Massachusetts to be in rebellion.
 1788 - The Habsburg Empire joins the Russo-Turkish War on the Russian side.
 1796 – Jiaqing takes over from Qianlong as Emperor of China.
 1825 – After an indecisive election, the United States House of Representatives declares John Quincy Adams as President of the United States.
 1839 - In the Southern Ocean, British whaling captain John Balleny discovers Sturge Island, part of the group of islands now known as the Balleny Islands. His companion Thomas Freeman sets foot on the island.
 1849 - The New Roman Republic is created.
 1861 – Jefferson Davis is chosen to become President of the Confederate States of America.
 1870 - US President Ulysses S. Grant signs a joint resolution of Congress, creating the US Weather Bureau.
 1889 - US President Grover Cleveland signs a bill elevating the United States Department of Agriculture to a cabinet-level agency.
 1895 - William G. Morgan creates a game called Mintonette, which later becomes better known as Volleyball.
 1900 – Dwight Filley Davis founds the Davis Cup tennis tournament, which has been named after him.

1901  2000
 1904 - Russo-Japanese War: The Battle of Port Arthur ends.
 1913 - A group of meteors can be seen in the Eastern parts of North America and South America.
 1920 - Under the Svalbard Treaty, Norway's governing of the Svalbard archipelago is recognized.
 1922 – Brazil joins the Berne Convention Copyright Treaty.
 1934 - The Balkan Entente is formed.
 1942 – Year-round Daylight Saving Time is re-introduced in the United States.
 1943 – World War II: The Allies declare the island of Guadalcanal secure after Imperial Japan evacuates its remaining forces.
 1945 - World War II: Battle of the Atlantic - HMS Venturer sinks U-864 off the coast of Fedie, Norway in a rare instance of submarine-to-submarine combat.
 1945 - World War II: A force of Allied aircraft unsuccessfully attack a German destroyer in Fordefjorden, Norway.
 1950 – Joseph McCarthy accuses the United States State Department of being filled with Communists.
 1951 - Korean War: Geochang massacre.
 1959 - R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, becomes operational in Plesetsk, northern Russia, Soviet Union.
 1964 – The Beatles appear on the US TV show, the Ed Sullivan Show.
 1964 – The Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, end.
 1965 – The first US combat troops are sent to Vietnam.
 1969 – First test flight of a Boeing 747
 1971 – Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third human Moon landing.
 1971 – A magnitude 6.6 earthquake strikes the San Fernando Valley in California, killing 65 people.
 1975 – The Soviet Soyuz 17 spacecraft returns to Earth.
 1983 – Prize-winning racehorse Shergar is kidnapped in Ireland and is never seen again.
 1986 – Comet Halley passes through Perihelion. It will not do so again until 2061.
 1991 – Lithuania votes for independence.
 1995 – On the Space Shuttle, Bernard A. Harris, Jr. and Michael Foale become the first African American and first Briton respectively to perform a space walk.
 1996 – The Irish Republican Army declares an end to its 18-month ceasefire and explodes a bomb in London's docklands.

From 2001
 2001 - American submarine US Greenville accidentally strikes and sinks the Ehime-Maru, a Japanese training vessel operated by the Uwajima Fishery High School, killing 9 crew members.
 2006 - The discovery of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt, is announced.
 2014 - In a referendum, slightly over half of voters in Switzerland support limiting immigration from the European Union.
 2016 - Two trains collide near Bad Aibling, Bavaria, southern Germany, killing 12 people and injuring up to 100.
 2018 - 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang of Republic of Korea (South Korea) begin.

Births

Up to 1900
 1060 - Pope Honorius II (d. 1130)
 1533 - Shimazu Yoshihisa, Japanese samurai (d. 1611)
 1645 – Johann Aegidus Bach, German musician (d. 1716)
 1711 - Luis Vicente de Velasco e Isla, Spanish sailor and naval commander (d. 1762)
 1737 – Thomas Paine, English-born American intellectual, revolutionary and founding father of the United States (d. 1809)
 1748 – Luther Martin, American patriot (d. 1826)
 1751 – Antoine Bullant, Czech musician and opera composer (d. 1821)
 1763 - Ludwig I, Grand Duke of Baden (d. 1830)
 1769 - George W. Campbell, Scottish-born 5th United States Secretary of the Treasury (d. 1848)
 1773 – William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States (d. 1841)
 1775 - Farkas Bolyai, Hungarian mathematician (d. 1856)
 1781 – Johann Baptist von Spix, German scientist (d. 1826)
 1783 – Vasily Zhukovsky, Russian poet (d. 1852)
 1789 - Franz Xaver Gabelsberger, German inventor of stenography (d. 1849)
 1814 – Samuel J. Tilden, American politician (d. 1886)
 1830 – Abd-ul Aziz, Ottoman Sultan (d. 1876)
 1834 – Kamehameha IV, King of Hawaii (d. 1863)
 1839 - Silas Adams, American lawyer and politician (d. 1896)
 1843 - Nathan Goff, American lawyer and politician (d. 1920)
 1846 – Wilhelm Maybach, German engineer and entrepreneur (d. 1929)
 1853 - Leander Starr Jameson, British-born South African politician (d. 1917)
 1856 - Hara Takashi, Prime Minister of Japan (d. 1921)
 1865 – Erich von Drygalski, German geographer, geophysicist and polar scientist (d. 1949)
 1865 - Wilson Bentley, American photographer and scientist (d. 1931)
 1879 - Jacques Bainville, French historian and journalist (d. 1936)
 1880 - Lipot Fejer, Hungarian mathematician (d. 1989)
 1883 - Jules Berry, French actor (d. 1951)
 1885 - Alban Berg, Austrian composer (d. 1935)
 1887 - Toivo Aro, Finnish diver (d. 1962)
 1891 - Pietro Nenni, Italian politician (d. 1980)
 1892 – Peggy Wood, American actress (d. 1978)
 1893 – Georgios Athanasiadis-Novas, Greek lawyer and politician (d. 1987)
 1895 – Hermann Brill, German politician (d. 1959)
 1896 - Alberto Vargas, Peruvian painter (d. 1962)
 1897 - Charles Kingsford Smith, Australian pilot (d. 1935)

1901  1950
 1902 – Leon M'ba, 1st President of Gabon (d. 1967)
 1907 - Truong Chinh, 4th President of Vietnam (d. 1988)
 1909 – Robert Velter, French comic artist (d. 1991)
 1909 – Carmen Miranda, Portuguese-Brazilian actress (d. 1955)
 1909 – Dean Rusk, United States Secretary of State (d. 1994)
 1910 – Jacques Monod, French biochemist (d. 1976)
 1910 - Elbert N. Carvel, Governor of Delaware (d. 2005)
 1912 - Futabayama Sadaji, Japanese sumo wrestler (d. 1968)
 1912 - Ginette Leclerc, French actress (d. 1992)
 1914 - Ernest Tubb, American singer (d. 1984)
 1920 - Edward Joseph McManus, American politician and jurist (d. 2017)
 1922 – Kathryn Grayson, American singer and actress (d. 2010)
 1923 – Brendan Behan, Irish writer and activist (d. 1964)
 1923 - Tonie Nathan, American political figure (d. 2014)
 1925 – Burkhard Heim, German physicist (d. 2001)
 1926 – Garret FitzGerald, Irish politician and Taoiseach (d. 2011)
 1927 - David Wheeler, British computer scientist
 1928 – Frank Frazetta, American artist (d. 2010)
 1928 - Herman Pieter de Boer, Dutch writer, poet and journalist (d. 2014)
 1928 – Rinus Michels, Dutch footballer and coach (d. 2005)
 1928 - Roger Mudd, American journalist
 1929 - A. R. Antulay, Indian politician, 8th Chief Minister of Maharashtra (d. 2014)
 1931 - Josef Masopust, Czech footballer (d. 2015)
 1931 - Thomas Bernhard, Austrian playwright and novelist (d. 1989)
 1932 – Gerhard Richter, German artist
 1932 - Tatsuro Hirooka, Japanese baseball player and manager
 1933 - Arthur A. Neu, American politician (d. 2015)
 1936 – Clive Swift, British actor
 1936 – Stompin' Tom Connors, Canadian country music singer (d. 2013)
 1937 – Hildegard Behrens, German operatic soprano (d. 2009)
 1939 – Janet Suzman, South African actress
 1940 – J. M. Coetzee, South African-born Australian Nobel Prize-winning writer
 1940 – Brian Bennett, British musician (The Shadows)
 1940 - Enrique Olivera, Argentine politician (d. 2014)
 1941 - Sheila Kuehl, American actress, activist and politician
 1942 – Carole King, American singer
 1943 - Ryland Davies, Welsh operatic tenor
 1943 – Joe Pesci, American actor
 1943 – Joseph E. Stiglitz, American economist
 1944 - Alice Walker, American writer
 1945 – Mia Farrow, American actress
 1945 - Yoshinori Ohsumi, Japanese cell biologist
 1946 - Jim Webb, United States Senator from Virginia
 1947 – Carla Del Ponte, Swiss UN prosecutor
 1948 - David Hayman, Scottish actor
 1948 - Guy Standing, English economist
 1949 – Judith Light, American actress
 1949 - Bernard Gallacher, Scottish golfer
 1950 - James Luna, American performance artist (d. 2018)

1951  1975
 1951 - Jay Inslee, 23rd Governor of Washington
 1953 – Ciaran Hinds, Northern Irish actor
 1954 - Mary Jo Duffy, American comic book writer and editor
 1955 - Charles Shaughnessy, British actor
 1957 - Terry McAuliffe, 72nd Governor of Virginia
 1957 - Ruy Ramos, Brazilian-Japanese footballer
 1957 – Gordon Strachan, Scottish footballer and manager
 1958 – Sandy Lyle, Scottish golfer
 1958 - Cyrille Regis, English footballer (d. 2018)
 1959 – Ali Bongo Ondimba, 3rd President of Gabon
 1960 – Holly Johnson, English singer (Frankie Goes to Hollywood)
 1960 - Peggy Whitson, American biochemist and astronaut
 1961 – Jussi Lampi, Finnish musician and actor
 1963 – Brian Greene, American physicist
 1963 - Travis Titt, American singer-songwriter and producer
 1965 - Dieter Baumann, German athlete
 1965 - Christian Schenk, German athlete
 1965 - Igor Malkov, Russian speed skater
 1965 - Julie Warner, American actress
 1966 - Ellen van Langen, Dutch athlete
 1966 - Harald Eia, Norwegian actor and comedian
 1968 - Alejandra Guzman, Mexican singer and actress
 1970 – Glenn McGrath, Australian cricketer
 1971 – Johan Mjallby, Swedish footballer
 1972 – Darren Ferguson, Scottish footballer
 1973 - Makoto Shinkai, Japanese director, writer, artist and graphic designer
 1974 - Amber Valletta, American model and actress
 1974 - Jordi Cruyff, Dutch footballer
 1974 - Erra Frazira, Malaysian actress and singer

From 1976
 1978 - A. J. Buckley, Irish-Canadian actor, director and screenwriter
 1979 – Zhang Ziyi, Chinese actress
 1979 - Akinora Iwamura, Japanese baseball player
 1979 – David Gray, British snooker player
 1980 – Angelos Charisteas, Greek footballer
 1981 – John Walker Lindh, American Taliban fighter
 1981 – The Rev, American musician (Avenged Sevenfold) (d. 2009)
 1981 - Tom Hiddleston, English actor
 1982 – Ami Suzuki, Japanese singer
 1984 - Han Geng, Chinese singer, actor and dancer
 1985 - David Gallagher, American actor
 1986 – Princess Rajyah bint Al Hussein of Jordan
 1986 - Stina Lykke Petersen, Danish footballer
 1987 – Magdalena Neuner, German biathlete
 1987 - Rose Leslie, Scottish actress
 1987 - Michael B. Jordan, American actor
 1988 – Lotte Friis, Danish swimmer
 1989 – Shunta Takahashi, Japanese footballer
 1989 - Gia Farrell, American singer
 1990 – Camille Winbush, American actress
 1992 - Avan Jogia, Canadian actor, singer and dancer
 1993 - Parimarjan Negi, Indian chess player
 1993 - Wataru Endo, Japanese footballer
 1996 - Jimmy Bennett, American actor and singer
 1996 - Kelli Berglund, American actress
 2001 - Erraid Davies, Scottish swimmer

Deaths

Up to 1900
 967 - Sayf al-Dawla, Emir of Aleppo (b. 916)
 1011 - Bernard I, Duke of Savoy
 1199 – Minamoto no Yoritomo, Japanese shogun (b. 1147)
 1450 - Agnes Sorel, mistress to Charles VIII of France (b. 1421)
 1555 - John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester
 1619 - Lucilio Vanini, Italian philosopher (b. 1585)
 1675 - Gerhard Douw, Dutch painter (b. 1613)
 1751 – Henri Francois d'Agesseau, Chancellor of France (b. 1668)
 1777 - Seth Pomeroy, American gunsmith and soldier (b. 1706)
 1782 – Johann Aloysius Assemani, Lebanese orientalist (b. 1710)
 1803 – Jean François de Saint-Lambert, French poet (b. 1716)
 1857 – Dionysios Solomos, Greek poet (b. 1798)
 1881 – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist (b. 1821)
 1889 – Peter Lalor, leader of the miners at the Eureka Stockade, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia (b. 1827)
 1891 - Johan Barthold Jongkind, Dutch painter (b. 1819)
 1894 - Maxime Du Camp, French writer (b. 1822)

1901  2000
 1905 - Adolph Menzel, German painter (b. 1815)
 1906 - Paul Laurence Dunbar, American poet (b. 1872)
 1930 – Richard With, Norwegian businessman (b. 1846)
 1936 - Caroline Furness, American astronomer (b. 1869)
 1936 - Jacques Bainville, French historian and journalist (b. 1879)
 1942 - Lauri Kristian Relander, 2nd President of Finland (b. 1883)
 1948 - Karl Valentin, German comedian, writer and movie producer (b. 1882)
 1957 – Miklos Horthy, Hungarian admiral (b. 1868)
 1960 – Erno Dohnanyi, Hungarian composer (b. 1877)
 1964 - Ary Barroso, Brazilian composer and singer (b. 1903)
 1966 - Sophie Tucker, Russian-American actress and singer (b. 1884)
 1973 - Max Yasgur, American farmer, owned the site of the Woodstock Festival (b. 1919)
 1975 - Pierre Dac, French activist (b. 1893)
 1977 - Alia al-Hussein, Queen Consort of Jordan (b. 1948)
 1977 – Sergey Ilyushin, Russian aircraft designer (b. 1894)
 1979 – Dennis Gabor, Hungarian-born British physicist (b. 1900)
 1981 – Bill Haley, American musician (Bill Haley & His Comets) (b. 1925)
 1984 – Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (b. 1914)
 1989 - Osamu Tezuka, Japanese manga artist (b. 1928)
 1991 - Daigoro Kondo, Japanese footballer (b. 1907)
 1994 – Howard Martin Temin, American geneticist (b. 1934)
 1997 - Barry Evans, British actor (b. 1943)
 1998 - Maurice Schumann, French politician (b. 1911)

From 2001
 2001 – Herbert Simon, American economist (b. 1916)
 2002 – Princess Margaret of the United Kingdom (b. 1930)
 2002 - Vicente Sardinero, Spanish baritone (b. 1937)
 2005 - Robert Kearns, American engineer (b. 1927)
 2007 – Ian Richardson, Scottish actor (b. 1934)
 2007 - Alejandro Finisterre, Spanish inventor of table football (b. 1919)
 2009 – Eluana Englaro, Italian patient in right-to-die case (b. 1970)
 2010 – Walter Frederick Morrison, American inventor (b. 1920)
 2014 - Marius, giraffe controversially put to sleep at Copenhagen Zoo (b. 2012)
 2014 - Gabriel Axel, Danish movie director and actor (b. 1918)
 2014 - Ranjit Bhatia, Indian runner (b. 1936)
 2014 - Serafin R. Cuevas, Filipino lawyer (b. 1928)
 2015 - Jorge Sassi, Argentine actor (b. 1950)
 2016 - Sushil Koirala, 37th Prime Minister of Nepal (b. 1939)
 2016 - André van den Heuvel, Dutch actor, director and singer (b. 1927)
 2016 - Sibghattullah Mojaddedi, President of Afghanistan (b. 1926)
 2017 - Serge Baguet, Belgian cyclist (b. 1969)
 2017 - Packy, American-held elephant (b. 1962)
 2017 - André Salvat, French colonel (b. 1920)
 2017 - Radu Gabrea, Romanian film director and screenwriter (b. 1937)
 2018 - Johann Johannsson, Icelandic film score composer (b. 1969)
 2018 - Reg E. Cathey, American actor (b. 1958)
 2018 - Jim Garrett, American football player (b. 1930)
 2018 - Alfonso Lacadena, Spanish academic (b. 1964)
 2018 - Craig MacGregor, American musician (b. 1949)
 2018 - Liam Miller, Irish footballer (b. 1981)
 2018 - Wally Moon, American baseball player (b. 1930)
 2018 - Anne Treisman, English-American psychologist (b. 1935)

Holidays and Observances
 St. Maroun's Day (Lebanon)

February 09

February 9


COX-2 inhibitors are a special type of analgesic. Cyclooxygenase (commonly abbreviated as COX) is an enzyme that has an important role in starting an inflammation and pain.  There are many different types of COX; the most common are known as COX-1 and COX-2. NSAIDs work by blocking COX. The problem with blocking all COX is that COX-1 is also used to regulate kidney function. Blocking COX-1 runs the risk of bleeding of the stomach, and reduction of the kidney function. COX-2 inhibitors only block COX-2, and do not have an effect on COX-1..  Clinical studies have shown that they increase the risk of a heart attack, and of a stroke.  Several COX-2 inhibitors have been taken off the market, because of these side-effects.

Other than as an analgesic, COX-2 inhibitors have also been used in the treatment of cancer, and of some neurological conditions, such as depression, and schizophrenia.

Because of the severe side-effects, COX-2 inhibitors are usually only available with a prescription.
Category:Drugs

COX-2 inhibitors


Henry James "Harry" Fowler, MBE (10 December 1926 – 4 January 2012) was a British movie, stage, and television actor who has appeared in many movies during his 62-year career.

He was born in London, England on December 10, 1926. He was married to Joan Dowling from 1951 until she committed suicide in 1954. Then he was married Catherine Fowler from around 1955 until his death in 2012. Fowler died on January 4, 2012 from unknown causes in London, England, he was 85 years old.

References

Other websites

Category:1926 births
Category:2012 deaths
Category:English movie actors
Category:English stage actors
Category:English television actors
Category:Actors from London

Harry Fowler


Begnins is a municipality in Nyon, in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.

References

Other websites

 Official website

Category:Municipalities of Vaud

Begnins


Abraham Viktor Rydberg (born 18 December 1828 in Jönköping, Sweden, died 21 September 1895 in Djursholm, Sweden) was a Swedish writer. Between 1877-1895 he was a member of the Swedish Academy.

References

Category:1828 births
Category:1895 deaths
Category:Swedish writers

Viktor Rydberg


Oceanic crust is the part of Earth's lithosphere that is under the ocean basins.

Oceanic crust is primarily composed of mafic rocks, or sima which is named for its magnesium silicate minerals. It is thinner than continental crust, and is about 7-10 kilometers thick, however it is more dense, having a mean density of about 3.3 g/cm3.

Oceanic crust generally does not last longer than 200 million years. In the rock cycle, it is continuously created at oceanic ridges. At these ridges, hot magma rises into the crust and cools, pushing the crust apart at the ridge. The continuous formation of new oceanic crust pushes the older crust away from the mid-ocean ridge. As it moves away from the ridge, the crust becomes cooler and denser, while the sediment may build on top of it.

Related pages
Continental crust

References

Sources
Marshak, Stephen. (2005) Earth: Portrait of a Planet (41-87)

Other websites
Testing the Sea-Floor Spreading Hypothesis

Category:Geology

Oceanic crust


Fredrik Bajer (April 21, 1837 – January 22, 1922) was a Danish writer, teacher, and pacifist politician. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1908.

Bajer was born on April 21, 1837 in Vester Egede, Denmark. He fought  in the 1864 war against Prussia and Austria where he was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant. He was discharged in 1865, and moved to Copenhagen where he became a teacher, translator and writer.

He entered the Danish Parliament in 1872 as a member of Folketinget and held a seat there for the following 23 years. As a member of parliament, he worked for the use of international arbitration to solve conflicts among nations, and it is due to Bajer's efforts that foreign relations became part of the work of the Danish Parliament and that Denmark participated in the Inter-Parliamentary Union from the beginning and earned a distinguished position among its members.

He supported many peace organizations, both inside Denmark and Europe-wide. He helped guide the passage of a bill to reach arbitration agreements with Sweden and Norway.

Bajer died on January 22, 1922 in Copenhagen, Denmark from unknown causes, aged 84.

References

Other websites
 Nobel Committee information on 1908 laureates

Category:1837 births
Category:1922 deaths
Category:Danish writers
Category:Danish politicians
Category:Teachers
Category:Activists
Category:Nobel Peace Prize winners
Category:Danish Nobel Prize winners

Fredrik Bajer


Rapperswil-Jona (short: Rappi) is a municipality in See-Gaster in the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. It is at the east side of Lake Zurich (Zürichsee). As of December 2016, 26,962 people lived there.

On 1 January 2007 the municipalities Rapperswil and Jona joined together to become the new municipality of Rapperswil-Jona.

References

Other websites

Rapperswil-Jona (official site)
Capuchin monastery
University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil, HSR (university)
A brief history of Rapperswil

Category:Municipalities of St. Gallen
Category:Cities in Switzerland

Rapperswil-Jona


Mrs. Winterbourne is a 1996 romantic comedy and drama starring Shirley MacLaine, Ricki Lake, and Brendan Fraser.  It is kindly based on Cornell Woolrich's book I Married a Dead Man, which has already been filmed in Hollywood as No Man of Her Own (1950) starring Barbara Stanwyck, and in Hindi as Kati Patang (1970). The movie was filmed on location in and around Toronto, Ontario including Eaton Hall in King City, Ontario.

Cast
 Shirley MacLaine as Grace Winterbourne
 Ricki Lake as Connie Doyle/"Patricia Winterbourne"
 Brendan Fraser as Bill / Hugh Winterbourne
 Miguel Sandoval as Paco
 Loren Dean as Steve DeCunzo
 Peter Gerety as Father Brian Kilraine
 Jane Krakowski as Christine
 Debra Monk as Lieutenant Ambrose
 Cathryn de Prume as Renee
 Susan Haskell as Patricia Winterbourne
 Bobcat Goldthwait (uncredited) as TV comedian
 Paula Prentiss (uncredited) as Maternity nurse

References

Other websites

Category:1996 movies
Category:American movies

Mrs. Winterbourne


Magnet Cove is a census-designated place (CDP) in the US state of Arkansas.

Category:Census-designated places in Arkansas

Magnet Cove, Arkansas


Locon is a commune. It is found in the region Nord-Pas-de-Calais in the Pas-de-Calais department in the north of France.

Other websites
 Official website of Locon

Category:Communes in Pas-de-Calais

Locon


Erula (Èrula) is a town and comune (municipality) in the Province of Sassari in Sardinia, Italy. As of 2016, 745 people lived there. Its area is 39.31 km². It is 457 meters above sea level.

References

Other websites

Category:Communes of Sardinia

Erula


David Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American movie director. His movies include Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and  Mulholland Drive. He was also responsible for a television series called Twin Peaks, his overall most famous work. Eraserhead, his first movie, is still his most famous theatrical movie. It was recently deemed socially important by the United States Library of Congress. He has done much work with Jack Nance, who has appeared been in all but two of his movies. He has said that all his movies will be done using digital video from now on.

He is also famous for his early short movies. The Alphabet and The Grandmother are two of his best known. The Alphabet is about fear of education. The Grandmother is about a lonely boy who grows a grandmother like a plant from a seed.

Over his career, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director and a nomination for best screenplay. Lynch has twice won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also won a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.

Discography

Albums
 BlueBob (with John Neff, 2001)
 The Air is on Fire: Soundscape (2007)
 Polish Night Music (with Marek Żebrowski, 2008)
 Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse: Dark Night of the Soul (2010; Lynch is featured on two songs.)
 This Train (with Chrysta Bell, 2011)
 Crazy Clown Time (2011)

Singles
 "Ghost of Love" (2007)
 "Good Day Today" / "I Know" (2010)

Filmography

Features

Short movies

Television series

Online series

Music videos

Awards and nominations
Academy Awards:
 1980: Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (The Elephant Man, nominated)
 1987: Best Director (Blue Velvet, nominated)
 2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)BAFTA Awards:
 1981: Best Direction (The Elephant Man, nominated)
 1981: Best Screenplay (The Elephant Man, nominated)

Cannes Film Festival:
 1990: Golden Palm (Wild at Heart, won)
 1992: Golden Palm (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, nominated)
 1999: Golden Palm (The Straight Story, nominated)
 2001: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., won' Tied with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There)
 2001: Golden Palm (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

DGA Award:
 1981: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (The Elephant Man, nominated)

Emmy Awards:
 1990: Outstanding Achievement in Main Title Theme Music (Twin Peaks, nominated)
 1990: Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics (Twin Peaks for the song "Into the Night", nominated)
 1990: Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series (Twin Peaks for the pilot episode, nominated)
 1990: Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series (Twin Peaks for the pilot episode, nominated)
 1990: Outstanding Drama Series (Twin Peaks)Golden Globes:
 1980: Best Director (The Elephant Man, nominated)
 1987: Best Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)
 2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)
 2002: Best Screenplay (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

Independent Spirit Awards:
 1987: Best Director (Blue Velvet, nominated)
 1987: Best Screenplay (Blue Velvet, nominated)
 2000: Best Director (The Straight Story, nominated)
 2007: Special Distinction Award (Shared with Laura Dern for their collaborative work, won)

Saturn Awards:
 1993: Best Writing (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, nominated)
 1993: Life Career Award (won)
 2002: Best Director (Mulholland Dr., nominated)

Venice Film Festival:
 2006: Future Film Festival Digital Award (Inland Empire won)
 2006: Career Golden Lion (won)WGA Award:' 1981: Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium (The Elephant Man, nominated)
 1987: Best Original Screenplay (Blue Velvet'', nominated)

References

Category:1946 births
Category:Living people
Category:Actors from Montana
Category:American movie actors
Category:American movie directors
Category:American movie producers
Category:American screenwriters
Category:American television actors
Category:American television directors
Category:American television producers
Category:American television writers
Category:People from Missoula, Montana

David Lynch


Wiglaf is a character in the epic poem Beowulf. He is the orphaned son of a warrior king who enters the service of Beowulf, who is now the king of the Geats. He assists the warrior king in his battle against a dragon which has attacked his kingdom. Beowulf is incapacitated but Wiglaf comes to his aid and eventually the dragon dies after it is stabbed in the throat. The old king is severely injured and asks to be shown the dragon's treasure. With his dying words, he crowns Wiglaf as his successor (as he does not have any biological children and all of his forebears have passed away). Beowulf is then burned in a Norse funeral and Wiglaf rules the kingdom.

Category:Germanic mythology

Wiglaf


Rodelinghem is a commune. It is found in the region Nord-Pas-de-Calais in the Pas-de-Calais department in the north of France.

Category:Communes in Pas-de-Calais

Rodelinghem


Commensurability is a concept in the philosophy of science. Scientific theories are described as commensurable if one can compare them to find out which is more accurate. If there is  no way  one can compare them to determine which is more accurate, they are incommensurable.

Behind this is the idea that it is possible to see the world in multiple ways, and that there is not one fair method to see which way is right. Some think that scientific traditions (or paradigms) can be incommensurable: it is not really possible to say which one is right. This idea has been defended by Thomas Kuhn. He wrote: when paradigms change, the world changes with them. Paul Feyerabend was another philosopher who said that incommensurability was possible in scientific topics. He wrote that it is important to remember this, because it means that it is possible to say things that are not scientific, but also not wrong. These ideas were mainly aimed at Karl Popper and his ideas on falsification.

Two theories may not be comparable if one cannot find a way to compare them and decide which is right.

In popular culture
The concept of incommensurability is dramatized in the 2006 movie Idiocracy, when U.S. Army scientist Joe Bauers attempts to explain before a full Cabinet meeting his theory that the nation's crops would be better irrigated with water rather than with a sports drink.

References

Category:Philosophy of science

Commensurability


Samuel Huntington (July 16, 1731 - January 5, 1796) was an American jurist, statesman, and revolutionary leader from Connecticut. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress where he signed the Declaration of Independence, as Governor of Connecticut, and later as the first President of the United States in Congress Assembled, that is, the presiding officer of the Congress of the Confederation, the sole governing body of the first central government of the United States of America. His office was not that of today's President of the United States, which is a federal chief executive position created under the later United States Constitution.

Category:1731 births
Category:1796 deaths
Category:Governors of Connecticut
Category:Signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence

Samuel Huntington (statesman)


Arseniy Petrovych Yatsenyuk (, Arseniy Petrovych Yatseniuk; born May 22, 1974) is a Ukrainian politician, economist and lawyer. He was the Prime Minister of Ukraine. He became Prime Minister in February 2014. He resigned on 14 April 2016.

References

Other websites

Category:1974 births
Category:Living people
Category:Civil servants
Category:Economists
Category:Lawyers
Category:Prime Ministers of Ukraine
Category:Ukrainian scientists

Arseniy Yatsenyuk


Rule of law is a legal maxim that suggests that no one is above the law and governmental decisions must be made only by applying known legal and moral principles. The Rule of Law limits the powers of Government by judicial defense of laws and the Constitution which is based on recognized basic legal values, established in international law. The Rule of Law is meant to prevent dictatorship and to protect the rights of the people.

The Rule of Law is especially important as an influence on the economic development in developing and transitional countries. Constitutional economics is the study of  government spending, which, in many transitional and developing countries, is completely controlled by the executive. The standards of constitutional economics can be used during annual budget process. The availability of an effective court system, to be used by the civil society in courts in situations of unfair governmental distribution of national money is a key element for the success of the rule-of-law in developing countries.

To date, the term “rule of law” has been used primarily in the English-speaking countries.  The originally German doctrine of Rechtsstaat is similar, and has been translated into other languages of continental Europe as État de droit (Fr.), Estado de derecho (Sp.), Stato di diritto (It.), and Правовое государство (Ru.).  Rechsstaat can be translated into English as “legal state” or "constitutional state".

Rule of law is also a main purpose of Council of Europe for solidarity and international peace.

Related pages
 Constitution
 Constitutionalism
 Constitutional economics
 International human rights law
 Political economy
 Vienna Declaration
 Council of Europe

References

Other websites
 What is the Rule of Law? University of Iowa Center for International Finance and Development
 Centre for Public Law has an audio and written analysis of the Rule of Law by Lord Bingham of Cornhill (the senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary of the United Kingdom supreme court)

Category:Law

la:Regnum legis

Rule of law


St Paul's Girls' School is a private secondary school for girls in Hammersmith, London. The headmistress is Clarissa Farr. It was started by the Worshipful Company of Mercers in 1904 as a female version of St Paul's School. It is one of a few schools in England that does not have a uniform, but there are strict rules about 'cleavages, thighs and midriffs'. The students are called Paulinas.

St Paul's is ranked the best secondary school in London. In 2012, 99.1% of A Level grades were A*-B. In 2013 100% of GCSE results were A*-B (as in the four previous years) and 91.2% were A*, the highest percentage ever at the school or in the country. Famous women who were pupils there include Carol Thatcher, Rachel Weisz, Dodie Smith, Jennifer Saunders, Kitty Godfree, and Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve. 100% of Paulinas go on to university and 45% go to Cambridge or Oxford.

References

Category:1904 establishments in England
Category:London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham
Category:Schools in London

St Paul's Girls' School


Latin is a language that was used in Ancient Rome. Short Latin texts have been found from about the 5th century BC and longer texts from about the 3rd century BC.

Classical Latin was used in the 1st century BC and was the official language of the Roman Empire. It was widely used in the western part of the Mediterranean. The languages known as Romance languages developed from the spoken version, called Vulgar Latin.

Latin was very important to Christianity for many centuries. It is still spoken today during some religious activities. It is an official language in the Vatican, where the Pope leads the Roman Catholic Church. People in the Vatican sometimes speak to one another in Latin (if they have different first languages). The mass of the Catholic Church may be done entirely in Latin. This is the Mass of the Roman Rite (Extraordinary Form).

Current usage
Latin is called a dead language because no one speaks Latin as a first language anymore. Even though it is a dead language, it is not an extinct language because it is still used in daily life by some people. In fact, many people still study it in school. Latin is still useful because it shows how society and the language used to work. Knowing Latin makes it easier to learn the Romance languages.

People still read Latin classics such as the poems of Virgil, the memoirs of Caesar and the speeches of Cicero. Also, Latin is widely used as an international auxiliary language, notably in the Catholic Church, and by biologists when describing and naming new species.

Latin is still used in taxonomy to give scientific names to species and groups of species of living things. Some terms used in medicine to name parts of the body (such as bones) and diseases are also written in Latin.

Varieties
There are three types of Latin: Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, and Ecclesiastical Latin. Classical Latin was used by the educated Romans and is still studied around the world. Vulgar Latin was the more common spoken variety used by the common Romans and was learned by the peoples conquered by the Romans. Ecclesiastical Latin is common in Italian schools and still used by the Roman Catholic Church.

Latin was the most important language in most of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was taught in many European schools, and all universities used Latin as the teaching language. Latin began to lose its importance in the Reformation, but it was still often used by authors of scientific books and encyclopedias. Until about 1900 many universities accepted dissertations written in Latin.

As people from other regions of Europe learned Vulgar Latin during Roman conquests, each region developed its own language, a simplified form of Latin. Those languages are called Romance languages, and they are still spoken today. The five Romance languages with the largest number of speakers are Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. The Romance languages are very similar to one another, and speakers of one Romance language can understand many words and sentences (in both texts and spoken conversations) from another Romance language. For example, speakers of Portuguese can often understand Spanish. It can be said that the Romance languages are modern dialects of Latin.

Grammar

Latin has a similar inflection structure to Ancient Greek but a different alphabet.

Latin has seven different noun cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative. The vocative case is almost always the same as the nominative case; however, if the nominative ends in -us, it changes to -e, and if the nominative ends in -ius, it changes to -i. The locative takes the form of the dative. Latin nouns are declined, or changed, according to how they are used in the sentence. A noun can be declined five different ways. These ways are called declensions. The declensions are numbered 1 through 5 (first declension, second declension et), each having different endings that identify the noun's declension. When a noun is declined, twelve forms are made, two for each of the noun cases (the locative is omitted).

A similar thing is done to verbs, called conjugation. When a verb is conjugated, six forms are made. There are five factors that can change a verb: person, number, tense, voice, and mood. In all, there are 120 possible forms Latin verbs.

Writing Latin

Latin used to be written on plates of wax. There was little space and so words were run together, with no space between words. Sometimes papyrus was used, but this was expensive. Punctuation was an ancient idea but came to Latin later. Lowercase letters (small letters) are relatively modern inventions. The Roman alphabet was derived from the Etruscan language.

The following is the introduction to the Metamorphoses by Ovid (Book 1, lines 89–100); it describes the Golden Age.

After the fall of the Roman Empire

After the fall of the Roman Empire, many people still used Latin. Scholars such as Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Copernicus, Descartes and Newton wrote in Latin. As an example, Hugo Grotius published his De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) in 1625, which is one of the bases of international law.

References

Other websites

 Post-Classical Latin (including Medieval and Neo-Latin)
 Beginners' Latin on http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
 Glossarium Anglico-Latinum having many modern words
 Latin language Citizendium

Latin


Puno is a region in Peru. The capital city is also named Puno. It is on the eastern border with Bolivia. The western part of Lake Titicaca that is found in the region.

Category:Regions of Peru

Puno Region


Evolution is a scientific theory used by biologists. It explains how living things change over a long time, and how they have come to  be the way they are.

Earth is very old. By studying the layers of rock that make up Earth's crust, scientists can find out about its past. This kind of research is called historical geology.

It is known that living things have changed over time, because their remains can be seen in the rocks. These remains are called 'fossils'. This proves that the animals and plants of today are different from those of long ago.  The older the fossils, the bigger the differences from modern forms.  How has this come about? Evolution has taken place. That evolution has taken place is a fact, because it is overwhelmingly supported by many lines of evidence. At the same time, evolutionary questions are still being actively researched by biologists.

Comparison of DNA sequences allows organisms to be grouped by how similar their sequences are. In 2010 an analysis compared sequences to phylogenetic trees, and supported the idea of common descent. There is now "strong quantitative support, by a formal test", for the unity of life.

The theory of evolution is the basis of modern biology. Theodosius Dobzhansky, a well-known evolutionary biologist, has said: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".

Evidence for evolution

The evidence for evolution is given in a number of books. Some of this evidence is discussed here.

Fossils show that change has occurred
The realization that some rocks contain fossils was a very important event in natural history. There are three parts to this story:
Realizing that things in rocks which looked organic actually were the altered remains of living things. This was settled in the 16th and 17th centuries by Conrad Gessner, Nicolaus Steno, Robert Hooke and others.
Realizing that many fossils represented species which do not exist today. It was Georges Cuvier, the comparative anatomist, who proved that extinction occurred, and that different strata contained different fossils.p108
Realizing that early fossils were simpler organisms than later fossils. Also, the later the rocks, the more like the present day are the fossils.

Evolution of horses

The evolution of the horse family (Equidae) is a good example of the way that evolution works. The oldest fossil of a horse is about 52 million years old. It was a small animal with five toes on the front feet and four on the hind feet. At that time, there were more forests in the world than today. This horse lived in woodland, eating leaves, nuts and fruit with its simple teeth. It was only about as big as a fox.

About 30 million years ago the world started to become cooler and drier. Forests shrank; grassland expanded, and horses changed. They ate grass, they grew larger, and they ran faster because they had to escape faster predators. Because grass wears teeth out, horses with longer-lasting teeth had an advantage.

For most of this long period of time, there were a number of horse types (genera). Now, however, only one genus exists: the modern horse, Equus. It has teeth which grow all its life, hooves on single toes, great long legs for running, and the animal is big and strong enough to survive in the open plain. Horses lived in western Canada until 12,000 years ago, but all horses in North America became extinct about 11,000 years ago. The causes of this extinction are not yet clear. Climate change and over-hunting by humans are suggested.

So, scientists can see that changes have happened. They have happened slowly over a long time. How these changes have come about is explained by the theory of evolution.

Geographical distribution

This is a topic which fascinated both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. When new species occur, usually by the splitting of older species, this takes place in one place in the world. Once it is established, a new species may spread to some places and not others.

Australasia
Australasia has been separated from other continents for many millions of years. In the main part of the continent, Australia, 83% of mammals, 89% of reptiles, 90% of fish and insects and 93% of amphibians are endemic. Its native mammals are mostly marsupials like kangaroos, bandicoots, and quolls. By contrast, marsupials are today totally absent from Africa and form a small portion of the mammalian fauna of South America, where opossums, shrew opossums, and the monito del monte occur (see the Great American Interchange).

The only living representatives of primitive egg-laying mammals (monotremes) are the echidnas and the platypus. They are only found in Australasia, which includes Tasmania, New Guinea, and Kangaroo Island. These monotremes are totally absent in the rest of the world. On the other hand, Australia is missing many groups of placental mammals that are common on other continents (carnivora, artiodactyls, shrews, squirrels, lagomorphs), although it does have indigenous bats and rodents, which arrived later.

The evolutionary story is that placental mammals evolved in Eurasia, and wiped out the marsupials and monotremes wherever they spread. They did not reach Australasia until more recently. That is the simple reason why Australia has most of the world's marsupials and all the world's monotremes.

Hawaiian Drosophila (fruit flies)
In about , the Hawaiian Islands have the most diverse collection of Drosophila flies in the world, living from rainforests to mountain meadows. About 800 Hawaiian fruit fly species are known.

Genetic evidence shows that all the native fruit fly species in Hawaii have descended from a single ancestral species that came to the islands, about 20 million years ago. Later adaptive radiation was caused by a lack of competition and a wide variety of vacant niches. Although it would be possible for a single pregnant female to colonise an island, it is more likely to have been a group from the same species.

Distribution of Glossopteris

The combination of continental drift and evolution can explain what is found in the fossil record. Glossopteris is an extinct species of seed fern plants from the Permian period on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

Glossopteris fossils are found in Permian strata in southeast South America, southeast Africa, all of Madagascar, northern India, all of Australia, all of New Zealand, and scattered on the southern and northern edges of Antarctica.

During the Permian, these continents were connected as Gondwana. This is known from magnetic striping in the rocks, other fossil distributions, and glacial scratches pointing away from the temperate climate of the South Pole during the Permian.p103

Common descent
When biologists look at living things, they see that animals and plants belong to groups which have something in common. Charles Darwin explained that this followed naturally if "we admit the common parentage of allied forms, together with their modification through variation and natural selection".p402p456

For example, all insects are related. They share a basic body plan, whose development is controlled by master regulatory genes. They have six legs; they have hard parts on the outside of the body (an exoskeleton); they have eyes formed of many separate chambers, and so on. Biologists explain this with evolution. All insects are the descendants of a group of animals who lived a long time ago. They still keep the basic plan (six legs and so on) but the details change. They look different now because they changed in different ways: this is evolution.

It was Darwin who first suggested that all life on Earth had a single origin, and from that beginning "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved".p490 Evidence from molecular biology in recent years has supported the idea that all life is related by common descent.

Vestigial structures
Strong evidence for common descent comes from vestigial structures.p397 The useless wings of flightless beetles are sealed under fused wing covers. This can be simply explained by their descent from ancestral beetles which had wings that worked.p49

Rudimentary body parts, those that are smaller and simpler in structure than corresponding parts in ancestral species, are called vestigial organs. Those organs are functional in the ancestral species but are now either nonfunctional or re-adapted to a new function. Examples are the pelvic girdles of whales, halteres (hind wings) of flies, wings of flightless birds, and the leaves of some xerophytes (e.g. cactus) and parasitic plants (e.g. dodder).

However, vestigial structures may have their original function replaced with another. For example, the halteres in flies help balance the insect while in flight, and the wings of ostriches are used in mating rituals, and in aggressive display. The ear ossicles in mammals are former bones of the lower jaw.

"Rudimentary organs plainly declare their origin and meaning..." (p262). "Rudimentary organs... are the record of a former state of things, and have been retained solely though the powers of inheritance...  far from being a difficulty, as they assuredly do on the old doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated in accordance with the views here explained" (p402). Charles Darwin.

In 1893, Robert Wiedersheim published a book on human anatomy and its relevance to man's evolutionary history. This book contained a list of 86 human organs that he considered vestigial. This list included examples such as the appendix and the 3rd molar teeth (wisdom teeth).

The strong grip of a baby is another example. It is a vestigial reflex, a remnant of the past when pre-human babies clung to their mothers' hair as the mothers swung through the trees. This is borne out by the babies' feet, which curl up when it is sitting down (primate babies grip with the feet as well). All primates except modern man have thick body hair to which an infant can cling, unlike modern humans. The grasp reflex allows the mother to escape danger by climbing a tree using both hands and feet.

Vestigial organs often have some selection against them. The original organs took resources, sometimes huge resources. If they no longer have a function, reducing their size improves fitness. And there is direct evidence of selection. Some cave crustacea reproduce more successfully with smaller eyes than do those with larger eyes. This may be because the nervous tissue dealing with sight now becomes available to handle other sensory input.p310

Embryology
From the eighteenth century it was known that embryos of different species were much more similar than the adults. In particular, some parts of embryos reflect their evolutionary past. For example, the embryos of land vertebrates develop gill slits like fish embryos. Of course, this is only a temporary stage, which gives rise to many structures in the neck of reptiles, birds and mammals. The proto-gill slits are part of a complicated system of development: that is why they persisted.

Another example are the embryonic teeth of baleen whales. They are later lost. The baleen filter is developed from different tissue, called keratin. Early fossil baleen whales did actually have teeth as well as the baleen.

A good example is the barnacle. It took many centuries before natural historians discovered that barnacles were crustacea. Their adults look so unlike other crustacea, but their larvae are very similar to those of other crustacea.

Artificial selection

Charles Darwin lived in a world where animal husbandry and domesticated crops were vitally important. In both cases farmers selected for breeding individuals with special properties, and prevented the breeding of individuals with less desirable characteristics. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw a growth in scientific agriculture, and artificial breeding was part of this.

Darwin discussed artificial selection as a model for natural selection in the 1859 first edition of his work On the Origin of Species, in Chapter IV: Natural selection:
"Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change... which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection".p109

Nikolai Vavilov showed that rye, originally a weed, came to be a crop plant by unintentional selection. Rye is a tougher plant than wheat: it survives in harsher conditions. Having become a crop like the wheat, rye was able to become a crop plant in harsh areas, such as hills and mountains.

There is no real difference in the genetic processes underlying artificial and natural selection, and the concept of artificial selection was used by Charles Darwin as an illustration of the wider process of natural selection. There are practical differences. Experimental studies of artificial selection show that "the rate of evolution in selection experiments is at least two orders of magnitude (that is 100 times) greater than any rate seen in nature or the fossil record".p157

Artificial new species
Some have thought that artificial selection could not produce new species. It now seems that it can.

New species have been created by domesticated animal husbandry, but the details are not known or not clear. For example, domestic sheep were created by hybridisation, and no longer produce viable offspring with Ovis orientalis, one species from which they are descended. Domestic cattle, on the other hand, can be considered the same species as several varieties of wild ox, gaur, yak, etc., as they readily produce fertile offspring with them.

The best-documented new species came from laboratory experiments in the late 1980s. William Rice and G.W. Salt bred fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, using a maze with three different choices of habitat such as light/dark and wet/dry. Each generation was put into the maze, and the groups of flies that came out of two of the eight exits were set apart to breed with each other in their respective groups.

After thirty-five generations, the two groups and their offspring were isolated reproductively because of their strong habitat preferences: they mated only within the areas they preferred, and so did not mate with flies that preferred the other areas.

Diane Dodd was also able to show how reproductive isolation can develop from mating preferences in Drosophila pseudoobscura fruit flies after only eight generations using different food types, starch and maltose.

Dodd's experiment has been easy for others to repeat. It has also been done with other fruit flies and foods.

Observable changes
Some biologists say that evolution has happened when a trait that is caused by genetics becomes more or less common in a group of organisms. Others call it evolution when new species appear.

Changes can happen quickly in the smaller, simpler organisms. For example, many bacteria that cause disease can no longer be killed with some of the antibiotic medicines. These medicines have only been in use about eighty years, and at first worked extremely well. The bacteria have evolved so that they are no longer affected by antibiotics anymore. The drugs killed off all the bacteria except a few which had some resistance. These few resistant bacteria produced the next generation.

The Colorado beetle is famous for its ability to resist pesticides. Over the last 50 years it has become resistant to 52 chemical compounds used in insecticides, including cyanide. This is natural selection speeded up by the artificial conditions. However, not every population is resistant to every chemical. The populations only become resistant to chemicals used in their area.

History

Although there were a number of natural historians in the 18th century who had some idea of evolution, the first well-formed ideas came in the 19th century. Three biologists are most important.

Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829), a French biologist, claimed that animals changed according to natural laws. He said that animals could pass on traits they had acquired during their lifetime to their offspring, using inheritance. Today, his theory is known as Lamarckism. Its main purpose is to explain adaptations by natural means. He proposed a tendency for organisms to become more complex, moving up a ladder of progress, plus use and disuse.

Lamarck's idea was that a giraffe's neck grew longer because it tried to reach higher up. This idea failed because it conflicts with heredity (Mendel's work). Mendel made his discoveries about half a century after Lamarck's work.

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) wrote his On the Origin of Species in 1859. In this book, he put forward much evidence that evolution had occurred. He also proposed natural selection as the way evolution had taken place. But Darwin did not understand about genetics and how traits were actually passed on. He could not accurately explain what made children look like their parents.

Nevertheless, Darwin's explanation of evolution was fundamentally correct. In contrast to Lamarck, Darwin's idea was that the giraffe's neck became longer because those with longer necks survived better.p177/9 These survivors passed their genes on, and in time the whole species got longer necks.

Mendel
An Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) bred plants. In the mid-19th century, he discovered how traits were passed on from one generation to the next.

He used peas for his experiments: some peas have white flowers and others have red ones. Some peas have green seeds and others have yellow seeds. Mendel used artificial pollination to breed the peas. His results are discussed further in Mendelian inheritance. Darwin thought that the inheritance from both parents blended together. Mendel proved that the genes from the two parents stay separate, and may be passed on unchanged to later generations.

Mendel published his results in a journal that was not well-known, and his discoveries were overlooked. Around 1900, his work was rediscovered. Genes are bits of information made of DNA which work like a set of instructions. A set of genes are in every living cell. Together, genes organise the way an egg develops into an adult. With mammals, and many other living things, a copy of each gene comes from the father and another copy from the mother. Some living organisms, including some plants, only have one parent, so get all their genes from them. These genes produce the genetic differences which evolution acts on.

Darwin's theory
Darwin's On the Origin of Species has two themes: the evidence for evolution, and his ideas on how evolution took place. This section deals with the second issue.

Variation

The first two chapters of the Origin deal with variation in domesticated plants and animals, and variation in nature.

All living things show variation. Every population which has been studied shows that animal and plants vary as much as humans do.p90 This is a great fact of nature, and without it evolution would not occur. Darwin said that, just as man selects what he wants in his farm animals, so in nature the variations allow natural selection to work.

The features of an individual are influenced by two things, heredity and environment. First, development is controlled by genes inherited from the parents. Second, living brings its own influences. Some things are entirely inherited, others partly, and some not inherited at all.

The colour of eyes is entirely inherited; they are a genetic trait. Height or weight is only partly inherited, and the language is not at all inherited. Just to be clear: the fact that humans can speak is inherited, but what language is spoken depends on where a person lives and what they are taught. Another example: a person inherits a brain of somewhat variable capacity. What happens after birth depends on many things such as home environment, education and other experiences. When a person is adult, their brain is what their inheritance and life experience have made it.

Evolution only concerns the traits which can be inherited, wholly or partly. The hereditary traits are passed on from one generation to the next through the genes. A person's genes contain all the traits which they inherit from their parents. The accidents of life are not passed on. Also, of course, each person lives a somewhat different life: that increases the differences.

Organisms in any population vary in reproductive success.p81 From the point of view of evolution, 'reproductive success' means the total number of offspring which live to breed and leave offspring themselves.

Inherited variation
Variation can only affect future generations if it is inherited. Because of the work of Gregor Mendel, we know that much variation is inherited. Mendel's 'factors' are now called genes. Research has shown that almost every individual in a sexually reproducing species is genetically unique.p204

Genetic variation is increased by gene mutations. DNA does not always reproduce exactly. Rare changes occur, and these changes can be inherited. Many changes in DNA cause faults; some are neutral or even advantageous. This gives rise to genetic variation, which is the seed-corn of evolution. Sexual reproduction, by the crossing over of chromosomes during meiosis, spreads variation through the population. Other events, like natural selection and drift, reduce variation. So a population in the wild always has variation, but the details are always changing.p90

Natural selection

Evolution mainly works by natural selection. What does this mean? Animals and plants which are best suited to their environment will, on average, survive better. There is a struggle for existence. Those who survive will produce the next generation. Their genes will be passed on, and the genes of those who did not reproduce will not. This is the basic mechanism which changes a population and causes evolution.

Natural selection explains why living organisms change over time to have the anatomy, the functions and behaviour that they have. It works like this:
 All living things have such fertility that their population size could increase rapidly for ever.
 We see that the size of populations does not increase to this extent. Mostly, numbers remain about the same.
 The food and other resources are limited. Therefore, there is competition for food and resources.
 No two individuals are alike. Therefore, they will not have the same chances to live and reproduce.
 Much of this variation can be inherited. Parents pass such traits to the children through their genes.
 The next generation can only come from those that survive and reproduce. After many generations of this, the population will have more helpful genetic differences, and fewer harmful ones. Natural selection is really a process of elimination.p117 The elimination is being caused by the relative fit between individuals and the environment they live in.

Selection in natural populations
There are now many cases where natural selection has been proved to occur in wild populations. Almost every case investigated of camouflage, mimicry and polymorphism has shown strong effects of selection.

The force of selection can be much stronger than was thought by the early population geneticists. The resistance to pesticides has grown quickly. Resistance to warfarin in Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) grew rapidly because those that survived made up more and more of the population. Research showed that, in the absence of warfarin, the resistant homozygote was at a 54% disadvantage to the normal wild type homozygote.p182 This great disadvantage was quickly overcome by the selection for warfarin resistance.

Mammals normally cannot drink milk as adults, but humans are an exception. Milk is digested by the enzyme lactase, which switches off as mammals stop taking milk from their mothers. The human ability to drink milk during adult life is supported by a lactase mutation which prevents this switch-off. Human populations have a high proportion of this mutation wherever milk is important in the diet. The spread of this 'milk tolerance' is promoted by natural selection, because it helps people survive where milk is available. Genetic studies suggest that the oldest mutations causing lactase persistence only reached high levels in human populations in the last ten thousand years. Therefore, lactase persistence is often cited as an example of recent human evolution. As lactase persistence is genetic, but animal husbandry a cultural trait, this is gene–culture coevolution.

Adaptation

Adaptation is one of the basic phenomena of biology. Through the process of adaptation, an organism becomes better suited to its habitat.

Adaptation is one of the two main processes that explain the diverse species we see in biology.  The other is speciation (species-splitting or cladogenesis). A favourite example used today to study the interplay of adaptation and speciation is the evolution of cichlid fish in African rivers and lakes.

When people speak about adaptation they often mean something which helps an animal or plant survive. One of the most widespread adaptations in animals is the evolution of the eye. Another example is the adaptation of horses' teeth to grinding grass. Camouflage is another adaptation; so is mimicry. The better adapted animals are the most likely to survive, and to reproduce successfully (natural selection).

An internal parasite (such as a fluke) is a good example: it has a very simple bodily structure, but still the organism is highly adapted to its particular environment. From this we see that adaptation is not just a matter of visible traits: in such parasites critical adaptations take place in the life cycle, which is often quite complex.

Limitations
Not all features of an organism are adaptations.p251 Adaptations tend to reflect the past life of a species. If a species has recently changed its life style, a once valuable adaptation may become useless, and eventually become a dwindling vestige.

Adaptations are never perfect. There are always tradeoffs between the various functions and structures in a body. It is the organism as a whole which lives and reproduces, therefore it is the complete set of adaptations which gets passed on to future generations.

Genetic drift and its effect

In populations, there are forces which add variation to the population (such as mutation), and forces which remove it. Genetic drift is the name given to random changes which remove variation from a population. Genetic drift gets rid of variation at the rate of 1/(2N) where N = population size.p29 It is therefore "a very weak evolutionary force in large populations".p55

Genetic drift explains how random chance can affect evolution in surprisingly big ways, but only when populations are quite small.  Overall, its action is to make the individuals more similar to each other, and hence more vulnerable to disease or to chance events in their environment.

 Drift reduces genetic variation in populations, potentially reducing a population’s ability to survive new selective pressures.
 Genetic drift acts faster and has more drastic results in smaller populations. Small populations usually become extinct.
 Genetic drift may contribute to speciation, if the small group does survive.
 Bottleneck events: when a large population is suddenly and drastically reduced in size by some event, the genetic variety will be very much reduced. Infections and extreme climate events are frequent causes. Occasionally, invasions by more competitive species can be devastating. ♦ In the 1880/90s, hunting reduced the Northern elephant seal to only about 20 individuals. Although the population has rebounded, its genetic variability is much less than that of the Southern elephant seal.♦ Cheetahs have very little variation. We think the species was reduced to a small number at some recent time. Because it lacks genetic variation, it is in danger from infectious diseases.
Founder events: these occur when a small group buds off from a larger population. The small group then lives separately from the main population. The human species is often quoted as having been through such stages. For example, when groups left Africa to set up elsewhere (see human evolution). Apparently, we have less variation than would be expected from our worldwide distribution. Groups that arrive on islands far from the mainland are also good examples. These groups, by virtue of their small size, cannot carry the full range of alleles to be found in the parent population.

Species

How species form is a major part of evolutionary biology. Darwin interpreted 'evolution' (a word he did not use at first) as being about speciation. That is why he called his famous book On the Origin of Species.

Darwin thought most species arose directly from pre-existing species. This is called anagenesis: new species by older species changing. Now we think most species arise by previous species splitting: cladogenesis.

Species splitting
Two groups that start the same can also become very different if they live in different places. When a species gets split into two geographical regions, a process starts. Each adapts to its own situation. After a while, individuals from one group can no longer reproduce with the other group. Two good species have evolved from one.

A German explorer, Moritz Wagner, during his three years in Algeria in the 1830s, studied flightless beetles. Each species is confined to a stretch of the north coast between rivers which descend from the Atlas mountains to the Mediterranean. As soon as one crosses a river, a different but closely related species appears. He wrote later:
"... a [new] species will only [arise] when a few individuals [cross] the limiting borders of their range... the formation of a new race will never succeed... without a long continued separation of the colonists from the other members of their species".
This was an early account of the importance of geographical separation. Another biologist who thought geographical separation was critical was Ernst Mayr.

One example of natural speciation is the three-spined stickleback, a sea fish that, after the last ice age, invaded freshwater, and set up colonies in isolated lakes and streams. Over about 10,000 generations, the sticklebacks show great differences, including variations in fins, changes in the number or size of their bony plates, variable jaw structure, and color differences.

The wombats of Australia fall into two main groups, Common wombats and Hairy-nosed wombats. The two types look very similar, apart from the hairiness of their noses. However, they are adapted to different environments. Common wombats live in forested areas and eat mostly green food with lots of moisture. They often feed in the daytime. Hairy-nosed wombats live on hot dry plains where they eat dry grass with very little water or goodness in it. Their metabolic system is slow and they sleep most of the day underground.

When two groups that started the same become different enough, then they become two different species. Part of the theory of evolution is that all living things started off the same, but then split off into different groups over billions of years.

Modern evolutionary synthesis

This was an important movement in evolutionary biology, which started in the 1930s and finished in the 1950s. It has been updated regularly ever since.
The synthesis explains how the ideas of Charles Darwin fit with the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who found out how we inherit our genes. The modern synthesis brought Darwin's idea up to date. It bridged the gap between different types of biologists: geneticists, naturalists, and palaeontologists.

When the theory of evolution was developed, it was not clear that natural selection and genetics worked together. But Ronald Fisher showed that natural selection would work to change species. Sewall Wright explained genetic drift in 1931.

Evolution and genetics: evolution can be explained by what we know about genetics, and what we see of animals and plants living in the wild.
Thinking in terms of populations, rather than individuals, is important. The genetic variety existing in natural populations is a key factor in evolution.
Evolution and fossils: the same factors which act today also acted in the past.
Gradualism: evolution is gradual, and usually takes place by small steps. There are some exceptions to this, notably polyploidy, especially in plants.
Natural selection: the struggle for existence of animals and plant in the wild causes natural selection. The strength of natural selection in the wild was greater than even Darwin expected.
Genetic drift can be important in small populations.
The rate of evolution can vary. There is very good evidence from fossils that different groups can evolve at different rates, and that different parts of an animal can evolve at different rates.p292, 397

Some areas of research

Co-evolution

Co-evolution is where the existence of one species is tightly bound up with the life of one or more other species.

New or 'improved' adaptations which occur in one species are often followed by the appearance and spread of related features in the other species. The life and death of living things is intimately connected, not just with the physical environment, but with the life of other species.

These relationships may continue for millions of years, as it has in the pollination of flowering plants by insects. The gut contents, wing structures, and mouthparts of fossilized beetles and flies suggest that they acted as early pollinators. The association between beetles and angiosperms during the Lower Cretaceous period led to parallel radiations of angiosperms and insects into the late Cretaceous. The evolution of nectaries in Upper Cretaceous flowers signals the beginning of the mutualism between hymenoptera and angiosperms.

Tree of life

Charles Darwin was the first to use this metaphor in biology. The evolutionary tree shows the relationships among various biological groups. It includes data from DNA, RNA and protein analysis. Tree of life work is a product of traditional comparative anatomy, and modern molecular evolution and molecular clock research.

The major figure in this work is Carl Woese, who defined the Archaea, the third domain (or kingdom) of life. Below is a simplified version of present-day understanding.

Macroevolution

Macroevolution: the study of changes above the species level, and how they take place. The basic data for such a study are fossils (palaeontology) and the reconstruction of ancient environments. Some subjects whose study falls within the realm of macroevolution:
 Adaptive radiation, such as the Cambrian Explosion.
 Changes in biodiversity through time.
 Mass extinctions.
 Speciation and extinction rates.
 The debate between punctuated equilibrium and gradualism.
 The role of development in shaping evolution: heterochrony; hox genes.
 Origin of major categories: cleidoic egg; origin of birds.
It is a term of convenience: for most biologists it does not suggest any change in the process of evolution.p87 For some palaeontologists, what they see in the fossil record cannot be explained just by the gradualist evolutionary synthesis. They are in the minority.

Altruism and group selection

Altruism – the willingness of some to sacrifice themselves for others – is widespread in social animals. As explained above, the next generation can only come from those who survive and reproduce. Some biologists have thought that this meant altruism could not evolve by the normal process of selection. Instead a process called "group selection" was proposed. Group selection refers to the idea that alleles can become fixed or spread in a population because of the benefits they bestow on groups, regardless of the alleles' effect on the fitness of individuals within that group.

For several decades, critiques cast serious doubt on group selection as a major mechanism of evolution.

In simple cases it can be seen at once that traditional selection suffices. For example, if one sibling sacrifices itself for three siblings, the genetic disposition for the act will be increased. This is because siblings share on average 50% of their genetic inheritance, and the sacrificial act has led to greater representation of the genes in the next generation.

Altruism is now generally seen as emerging from standard selection. The warning note from Ernst Mayr, and the work of William Hamilton are both important to this discussion.

Hamilton's equation
Hamilton's equation describes whether or not a gene for altruistic behaviour will spread in a population. The gene will spread if rxb is greater than c:

where:
  is the reproductive cost to the altruist,
  is the reproductive benefit to the recipient of the altruistic behavior, and
  is the probability, above the population average, of the individuals sharing an altruistic gene – the "degree of relatedness".

Sexual reproduction

At first, sexual reproduction might seem to be at a disadvantage compared with asexual reproduction. In order to be advantageous, sexual reproduction (cross-fertilisation) has to overcome a two-fold disadvantage (takes two to reproduce) plus the difficulty of finding a mate. Why, then, is sex so nearly universal among eukaryotes? This is one of the oldest questions in biology.

The answer has been given since Darwin's time: because the sexual populations adapt better to changing circumstances. A recent laboratory experiment suggests this is indeed the correct explanation.

"When populations are outcrossed genetic recombination occurs between different parental genomes. This allows beneficial mutations to escape deleterious alleles on its original background, and to combine with other beneficial alleles that arise elsewhere in the population. In selfing populations, individuals are largely homozygous and recombination has no effect".

In the main experiment, nematode worms were divided into two groups. One group was entirely outcrossing, the other was entirely selfing. The groups were subjected to a rugged terrain and repeatedly subjected to a mutagen. After 50 generations, the selfing population showed a substantial decline in fitness (= survival), whereas the outcrossing population showed no decline. This is one of a number of studies that show sexuality to have real advantages over non-sexual types of reproduction.

What evolution is used for today
An important activity is artificial selection for domestication. This is when people choose which animals to breed from, based on their traits. Humans have used this for thousands of years to domesticate plants and animals.

More recently, it has become possible to use genetic engineering. New techniques such as 'gene targeting' are now available. The purpose of this is to insert new genes or knock out old genes from the genome of a plant or animal. A number of Nobel Prizes have already been awarded for this work.

However, the real purpose of studying evolution is to explain and help our understanding of biology. After all, it is the first good explanation of how living things came to be the way they are. That is a big achievement. The practical things come mostly from genetics, the science started by Gregor Mendel, and from molecular and cell biology.

Evolution gems
In 2010 the journal Nature selected 15 topics as 'Evolution gems'. These were:

Gems from the fossil record
Land-living ancestors of whales
From water to land (see tetrapod)
The origin of feathers (see origin of birds)
The evolutionary history of teeth
The origin of vertebrate skeleton

Gems from habitats
Natural selection in speciation
Natural selection in lizards
A case of co-adaptation
Differential dispersal in wild birds
Selective survival in wild guppies
Evolutionary history matters

Gems from molecular processes
Darwin's Galapagos finches
Microevolution meets macroevolution
Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
Variation versus stability

Nature is the oldest scientific weekly journal. The link downloads as a free text file, complete with references. The idea is to make the information available to teachers.

Responses to the idea of evolution

Debates about the fact of evolution

The idea that all life evolved had been proposed before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of species. Even today, some people still discuss the concept of evolution and what it means to them, their philosophy, and their religion. Evolution does explain some things about our human nature. People also talk about the social implications of evolution, for example in sociobiology.

Some people have the religious belief that life on Earth was created by a god. In order to fit in the idea of evolution with that belief, people have used ideas like guided evolution or theistic evolution. They say that evolution is real, but is being guided in some way.

There are many different concepts of theistic evolution. Many creationists believe that the creation myth found in their religion goes against the idea of evolution. As Darwin realised, the most controversial part of the evolutionary thought is what it means for human origins.

In some countries, especially in the United States, there is tension between people who accept the idea of evolution and those who do not accept it. The debate is mostly about whether evolution should be taught in schools, and in what way this should be done.

Other fields, like cosmology and earth science also do not match with the original writings of many religious texts. These ideas were once also fiercely opposed. Death for heresy was threatened to those who wrote against the idea that Earth was the center of the universe.

Evolutionary biology is a more recent idea. Certain religious groups oppose the idea of evolution more than other religious groups do. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church now has the following position on evolution: Pope Pius XII said in his encyclical Humani Generis published in the 1950s:
"The Church does not forbid that (...) research and discussions (..) take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter," Pope Pius XII Humani Generis

Pope John Paul II updated this position in 1996. He said that Evolution was "more than a hypothesis":
"In his encyclical Humani Generis, my predecessor Pius XII has already [said] that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation. (...) Today, more than a half-century after (..) that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines," Pope John Paul II speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Science

The Anglican Communion also does not oppose the scientific account of evolution.

Using evolution for other purposes
Many of those who accepted evolution were not much interested in biology. They were interested in using the theory to support their own ideas on society.

Racism
Some people have tried to use evolution to support racism. People wanting to justify racism claimed that certain groups, such as black people, were inferior. In nature, some animals do survive better than others, and it does lead to animals better adapted to their circumstances. With humans groups from different parts of the world, all evolution can say is that each group is probably well suited to its original situation. Evolution makes no judgements about better or worse. It does not say that any human group is superior to any other.

Eugenics

This amazing idea of eugenics was rather different. Two things had been noticed as far back as the 18th century. One was the great success of farmers in breeding cattle and crop plants. They did this by selecting which animals or plants would produce the next generation (artificial selection). The other observation was that lower class people had more children than upper-class people. If (and it's a big if) the higher classes were there on merit, then their lack of children was the exact reverse of what should be happening. Faster breeding in the lower classes would lead to the society getting worse.

The idea to improve the human species by selective breeding is called eugenics. The name was proposed by Francis Galton, a bright scientist who meant to do good.  He said that the human stock (gene pool) should be improved by selective breeding policies. This would mean that those who were considered "good stock" would receive a reward if they reproduced. However, other people suggested that those considered "bad stock" would need to undergo compulsory sterilization, prenatal testing and birth control. The German Nazi government (1933–1945) used eugenics as a cover for their extreme racial policies, with dreadful results.

The problem with Galton's idea is how to decide which features to select. There are so many different skills people could have, you could not agree who was "good stock" and who was "bad stock". There was rather more agreement on who should not be breeding. Several countries passed laws for the compulsory sterilisation of unwelcome groups. Most of these laws were passed between 1900 and 1940. After World War II, disgust at what the Nazis had done squashed any more attempts at eugenics.

Algorithm design
Some equations can be solved using algorithms that simulate evolution. Evolutionary algorithms work like that.

Social Darwinism
Another example of using ideas about evolution to support social action is Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is a term given to the ideas of the 19th century social philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer believed the survival of the fittest could and should be applied to commerce and human societies as a whole.

Again, some people used these ideas to claim that racism, and ruthless economic policies were justified. Today, most biologists and philosophers say that the theory of evolution should not be applied to social policy.

Controversy
Some people disagree with the idea of evolution. They disagree with it for a number of reasons. Most often these reasons are influenced by or based on their religious beliefs. People who do not agree with evolution usually believe in creationism or intelligent design.

Despite this, evolution is one of the most successful theories in science. People have discovered it to be useful for different kinds of research. None of the other suggestions explain things, such as fossil records, as well. So, for almost all scientists, evolution is not in doubt.

Further reading

Evidence for evolution
These books are mostly about the evidence for evolution.
Coyne, Jerry A. 2009 Why evolution is true. Oxford University Press, Oxford.  (pbk)
Dawkins, Richard 2009. The greatest show on Earth. Bantam, London.  (hbk)
Futuyma D.J. 1983. Science on trial: the case for evolution. Pantheon Books, New York. ; 2nd ed 1995 Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts. .
Prothero, Donald R. 2007. Evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters. Columbia University Press, New York.  (hbk)

The process of evolution
These books cover most evolutionary topics.
Barton N.H; Briggs D.E.G; Eisen J.A; Goldstein D.B. & Patel N.H. 2007. Evolution. New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. . Strong in molecular evolution; brings together molecular biology with evolutionary concepts.
Futuyma D.J. 1979. Evolutionary biology. 1st ed. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts. ; 2nd ed 1986 Sinauer. ; 3rd ed 1998 Sinauer. . Widely used textbook, available second-hand. For students and teachers.
 Futuyma D.J. 2005. Evolution. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts. ; 2nd ed 2009 Sinauer. . Successor to above; but basically a different book. For students and teachers.
Freeman, Scott & Herron, Jon; 1997. Evolutionary analysis. Prentice Hall ; 2nd ed 2000 ; 3rd ed 2004 Cummings ; 4th ed 2007 Cummings . Modern topics such as phylogenetic trees based on genomics, genetics, molecular biology. Has website:  For students and teachers.
Ridley, Mark 1993. Evolution. Blackwell ; 2nd ed 1996 Wiley-Blackwell ; 3rd ed 2003 Wiley . Comprehensive: case studies, commentary, dedicated website and CD. For students and teachers.
 Mayr, Ernst. 2001. What evolution is. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. . Clearly written, for a general audience.

Related pages
Human evolution

References

Other websites

 Understanding Evolution - a guide prepared by the University of California at Berkeley
 Darwin Online Darwin's publications; papers and bibliography; biographies, obituaries and reviews.
Talk Origins in depth website on information about evolution and the evidence for it
National Center for Science Education Information on how evolution works
PBS on evolution site

Evolution


The  (CERO) is a group that rates video games in Japan. It was established in 2002 by the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association. It does not rate games for personal computers.

Ratings
A (all ages)
B (ages 12 and up)
C (ages 15 and up)
D (ages 17 and up)
Z (ages 18 and up only)

Category:Video game ratings

Computer Entertainment Rating Organization


Magical Mystery Tour is a 1967 television movie made by The Beatles. It is also the movie's title song, and the name of its soundtrack recording.

Show
Paul McCartney had the original idea for Magical Mystery Tour, coming back from the Monterey Pop Festival in California, during the summer of 1967. He drew a clock face on a paper plate, and filled it with parts of the show he imagined. McCartney based the idea on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, who travelled the United States in a bus, and also "", which were low-budget weekend vacation trips taken in England.

The other Beatles liked the idea for the show, and made plans to produce and direct it themselves. After they stopped giving concerts in 1966, they had started making their own promotional films (called "promos"), much like today's music videos. They had success with promos, and wanted to try making a whole programme, to appear on television during the Christmas holidays.

Beatles manager Brian Epstein helped set up the production, and the Beatles asked friends, members of their staff, and some professional actors to ride with them in a rented bus over a holiday weekend, and film whatever happened, with magical elements to be added later. Making the movie was one of the first jobs of the Beatles's new company, Apple Corps.

Epstein unfortunately died before filming began. Without him to look over business details, things ran into trouble. By the time things were set up, John Lennon and George Harrison had changed their minds about performing, and spent much of the bus trip asleep. There also was not much for scenery along the roads, or entertainment among the passengers.

What turned into a bigger event than filming Magical Mystery Tour was the  that began to surround the bus, wondering what the "tour" was all about. People followed the bus for miles, and caused . People who saw the bus go by expected a "happening" of some kind, but none had been planned. In trying to be , nobody had worked out a  for the bus, or the trip. Most of the commotion ended after Lennon personally removed the MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR lettering from the sides of the bus. Later a Beatles assistant said the traffic jams should have also been filmed.

Spots for songs and performances were included in Magical Mystery Tour, and so was a  explaining what the trip was about. The songs featured in the show included "The Fool on the Hill", "I Am The Walrus", "Blue Jay Way", an instrumental song, "Flying", and "Your Mother Should Know", with a choreographed dance sequence. Another band, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, played live during a striptease performance.

Magical Mystery Tour appeared on British television on Boxing Day in 1967, and was a surprising flop. Part of the reason for its failure was because it was shown in black-and-white, while colour was an important feature. Another part was because most of the viewers did not understand what was supposed to be happening. Another part was that not much had happened on camera, for long parts of the programme, and it showed.

Ringo Starr made a personal appeal to the BBC to show Magical Mystery Tour again, in full colour. The BBC gave it a second broadcast, but it did not change opinions. ABC in the United States cancelled plans to show Magical Mystery Tour in America. (It later appeared as a "midnight movie", shown in small cinemas and on college campuses.)

Soundtrack
Even though Magical Mystery Tour was not a television success, its soundtrack still sold well. The show's songs were released as a double EP in England, with a storybook and pictures from the show. In America, Capitol Records added songs from recent Beatles singles to the show songs, and released a whole album. The American version outsold the EP in England, and in 1977 Parlophone Records released a British version of the album.

Songs
"Magical Mystery Tour" +
"The Fool On The Hill" +
"Flying" (instrumental) +
"Blue Jay Way" +
"Your Mother Should Know" +
"I Am The Walrus" +
"Hello Goodbye"
"Strawberry Fields Forever"
"Penny Lane"
"Baby You're A Rich Man"
"All You Need Is Love"

+ appeared in the show Magical Mystery Tour

All songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, except "Flying" (by Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr) and "Blue Jay Way" (by George Harrison).

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Magical Mystery Tour


David Todd Rawlings is a United States guitarist.  He is best known as the musical partner of bluegrass singer-songwriter Gillian Welch. Rawlings has also been a record producer, producing albums such as those by Welch and other artists like Old Crow Medicine Show.

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David Rawlings


Robert Dunkerson Orr (November 17, 1917 – March 10, 2004) was an American politician. He was the 45th Governor of Indiana from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party. He was served as United States Ambassador to Singapore from July 14, 1989 through September 12, 1992.

Orr was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was raised in Evansville, Indiana. He studied at Yale University and at Harvard University. Orr was married to Josie Wallace from 1946 until they divorce in 2000. In 2001, he married Mary Davis. Their marriage lasted until his death in 2004.

Orr died in Indianapolis, Indiana from complications of kidney surgery on March 10, 2004, aged 86.

References

Other websites
Biography from the Indiana Historical Bureau

Biography from the Indianapolis Star
The New York Times: Robert D. Orr, 86, Governor Who Revamped Indiana Schools
National Governors Association

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Robert D. Orr


Bernard Lamarre (6 August 1931 – 30 March 2016) was a Canadian engineer and businessman. He was born in Chicoutimi, Quebec in 1931.

Lamarre received a Bachelor of Appled Sciences in Civil Engineering from the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1952. He received a Master of Science degree from Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1955. He started work as a soil mechanics engineer with the firm of Lalonde & Valois eventually becoming president and chief executive officer of the firm now called Lavalin Group. He was president of Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec from 1993 to 1997.

References

Other websites
 Bernard Lamarre at The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Bernard Lamarre


Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (15 April 1931 – 26 March 2015) was a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator. He was awarded the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Tranströmer was born in Stockholm. He was married to Monica Bladh and had two daughters, Emma and Paula. He had a stroke in 1990, leaving him with aphasia and without the use of his right hand.

Tranströmer died after a short illness on 26 March 2015 at his home in Stockholm, aged 83.

References

Other websites

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Tomas Tranströmer


Pearsall is a city in the U.S. state of Texas.

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Category:County seats in Texas

Pearsall, Texas


William Forsythe (born June 7, 1955) is an American actor. Forsythe played Al Capone in the television series The Untouchables. Forsythe has also played Sammy Gravano in the HBO movie Gotti and the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in Dear Mr. Gacy.

References

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William Forsythe


Chhipaharmai Gaupalika () is a rural municipality in Parsa District of Nepal. There are 5 wards. Its area is  and population is 26,671.

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Chhipaharmai Gaupalika


Carter is a family name. It originally meant to haul goods in a cart. The name comes from the Gaelic and Celtic word cairt (cart). It originated in Ireland and Scotland. It later migrated to England, where it was changed to its English form.

People who have the name Carter include Lynda Carter, June Carter Cash, actress Dixie Carter and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Category:Surnames

Carter


Wild Horses is a song by The Rolling Stones from their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. It has been covered by many other artists. Alicia Keys' recording, for her album Alicia Keys: Unplugged, featured the frontman of Maroon 5, Adam Levine.

Category:2005 songs

Wild Horses


Schweinfurt is a city in Franconia. The population is about 50,000. Larger, nearby cities are Würzburg and Bamberg

References

Schweinfurt


Bloody Mary could refer to:

 Bloody Mary, a type of cocktail
 Mary I of England, former Queen of England and Ireland
 Bloody Mary (folklore), a ghost said to appear when summoned

Bloody Mary


Havana is a city in Arkansas in the United States.

Category:Cities in Arkansas

Havana, Arkansas


Time zones give specific areas on the Earth a time of day that is earlier or later than the neighboring time zones. This is because when it is daytime on one side of the earth, it is night-time on the other side. There are 24 time zones dividing the earth into different times, each with its own name, like the North American Eastern Time Zone. The North American Eastern Time Zone contains large cities in North America like New York City and Miami.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) began in 1675. This was when the Royal Observatory, Greenwich was built to help ships find their longitude at sea. GMT was a standard reference for time keeping when each city kept a different local time. When railways began carrying many people quickly among cities keeping different time, they adopted time zones to simplify operations. By about 1900, almost all time on earth was in the form of standard time zones.

Greenwich Mean Time is now called UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). UTC is the time standard of the world. All other parts of the world are offset (plus or minus) according to their longitude. Most of the zones are offset by a full hour, but there are some offset by half an hour or 45 minutes.

In some parts of the world they follow the Daylight Saving Time (DST), and during this period of time in summer they add one hour to their normal solar hour.

In the poles, the time is UTC in the North Pole and UTC+12 in the South Pole.

The time zones are numbered in relation to the UTC, so in Los Angeles the time zone will be UTC−8, in London UTC+0, in Rome UTC+1, and in New Delhi UTC+5:30.

Time zone