The sex ratio will be favored which maximizes the number of descendants an individual will have and hence the number of gene copies transmitted.

Hardy's weakness derived from his apparent inability to control the comings and goings of these divergent impulses and from his unwillingness to cultivate and sustain the energetic and risky ones.

Virginia Woolf's provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it hightlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional pricture of the "poetic" novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness.

As she put it in The Common Reader, "It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore."

With the conclusion of a burst of activity, the lactic acid level is high in the body fluids, leaving the large animal vulnerable to attack until the acid is reconverted, via oxidative metabolism, by the liver into glucose, which is then sent in part back to the muscles for glycogen resynthesis.

Although Gutman admits that forced separation by sale was frequent, he shows that the slaves' preference, revealed most clearly on plantations where sale was infrequent, was very much for stable monogamy.

Gutman argues convincingly that the stability of the Black family encouraged the transimission of - and so was crucial in sustaining - the Black heritage of folklore, music, and religious expression from one generation to another, a heritage that slaves were continually fashioning out of their Affican and American experiences.

This preference for exogamy, Gutman suggests, may have derived from West African rules governing marriage, which, though they differed from one tribal group to another, all involved some kind of prohibition against unions with close kin.

His thesis works relatively well when applied to discrimination against Blacks in the United States, but his definition of racial prejudice as "recially-based negative prejudgements against a group gererally accepted as a race in any given region of ethnic competition," can be interpreted as also including hostility toward such ethnic groups as the Chinese in California and the Jews in medieval Europe.

Such variations in size, shape, chemistry, conduction speed, excitation threshold, and the like as had been demonstrated in nerve cells remained negligible in significance for any possible correlation with the manifold dimensions of mental experience.

It was possible to demonstrate by other methods refined structural differences among neuron types; however, proof was lacking that the quality of the impulse or its condition was influenced by these differences, which seemed instead to influence the developmental patterning of the neural circuits.

Although qualitative variance among nerve energies was never rigidly disproved, the doctrine was generally abandoned in favor of the opposing view, namely, that nerve impulses are essentially homogeneous in quality and are transmitted as "common currency" throughout the nervous system.

Other experiments revealed slight variations in the size, number, arrangement, and interconnection of the nerve cells, but as far as psychoneural correlations were concerned, the obvious similarities of these sensory fields to each other seemed much more remarkable than any of the minute differences.

Although some experiments show that, as an object becomes familiar, its internal representation becomes more holistic and the recognition process correspoindingly more parallel, the weight of evidence seems to support the serial hypothesis, at least for objects that are not notably simple and familiar.

In large part as a consequence of the feminist movement, historians have focused a great deal of attention in recent years on determining more accurately the status of women in various periods.

If one begins by examining why ancients refer to Amazons, it becomes clear that ancient Greek descriptions of such societies were meant not so much to represent observed historical fact -- real Amazonian societies -- but rather to offer "moral lessons" on the supposed outcome of women's rule in their own society.

Thus, for instance, it may come as a shock to mathematicians to learn that the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom is not a literally correct description of this atom, but only an approximation to a somewhat more correct equation taking account of spin, magnetic dipole, and relativistic effects; and that this corrected equation if itself only an imperfect approximation to an infinite set of quantum field-theoretical equations.

The physicist rightly dreads precise argument, since an argument that is convincing only if it is precise loses all its force if the assumptions on which it is based are slightly changed, whereas an argument that is convincing though imprecise may well be stable under small perturbations of its underlying assumptions.

However, as they gained cohesion, the Bluestockings came to regard themselves as a women's group and to possess a sense of female solidarity lacking in the salonnieres, who remained isolated from one another by the primacy each held in her own salon.

As my own studies have advanced, I have been increasingly impressed with the functional similarities between insect and vertebrate societies and less so with the structural differences that seem, at first glance, to constitute such an immense gulf between them.