title: Sumerian King List

text: There is only one manuscript that contains a relatively undamaged version of the composition. This is the Weld-Blundell Prism which includes the antediluvian part of the composition and ends with the Isin dynasty. Other manuscripts are incomplete because they are damaged or fragmentary. The Scheil dynastic tablet, from Susa, for example, only contains parts of the composition running from Uruk II to Ur III.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The majority of the sources is dated to the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium BC), and more specifically the early part of that era. In many cases, a more precise dating is not possible, but in one case, the Weld-Blundell prism, it could be dated to year 11 of the reign of king Sin-Magir of Isin, the last ruler to be mentioned in the "Sumerian King List". The so-called "Ur III Sumerian King List" ("USKL"), on a clay tablet possibly found in Adab, is the only known version of the "SKL" that predates the Old Babylonian period. The colophon of this text mentions that it was copied during the reign of Shulgi (2084–2037 BC), the second king of the Ur III dynasty. The "USKL" is especially interesting because its pre-Sargonic part is completely different from that of the "SKL". Whereas the "SKL" records many different dynasties from several cities, the "USKL" starts with a single long list of rulers from Kish (including rulers who, in the "SKL" were part of different Kish dynasties), followed by a few other dynasties, followed again by the kings of Akkad.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The sources differ in their exact contents. This is not only the result of many sources being fragmentary, it is also the result of scribal errors made during copying of the composition, and of the fact that changes were made to the composition through time. For example, the section on rulers before the flood is not present in every copy of the text, including every text from Nippur, where the majority of versions of the "SKL" was found. Also, the order of some of the dynasties or kings may be changed between copies, some dynasties that were separately mentioned in one version are taken together in another, details on the lengths of individual reigns vary, and individual kings may be left out entirely.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The following summary and line numbers are taken from the compilation by the "Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature", which in turn takes the text of the Weld-Blundell prism as its main source, listing other versions when there are differences in the text.


title: Sumerian King List

text: This section, which is not present in every copy of the text, opens with the line "After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu." Two kings of Eridu are mentioned, before the city "fell" and the "kingship was taken to Bad-tibira". This pattern of cities receiving kingship and then falling or being defeated, only to be succeeded by the next, is present throughout the entire text, often in the exact same words. This first section lists eight kings who ruled over five cities (apart from Eridu and Bad-tibiru, these also included Larag, Zimbir and Shuruppag). The duration of each reign is also given. In this first section, the reigns vary between 43,200 and 28,800 years for a total of 241,200 years. The section ends with the line "Then the flood swept over". Among the kings mentioned in this section is the ancient Mesopotamian god Dumuzid (the later Tammuz).


title: Sumerian King List

text: "After the flood had swept over, and the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Kish." After this well-known line, the section goes on to list 23 kings of Kish, who ruled between 1500 and 300 years for a total of 24,510 years. The exact number of years varies between copies. Apart from the lengths of their reigns and whether they were the son of their predecessor (for example, "Mashda, the son of Atab, ruled for 840 years"), no other details are usually given on the exploits of these kings. Exceptions are Etana, "who ascended to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries" and Enmebaragesi, "who made the land of Elam submit". Enmebaragesi is also the first king in the "Sumerian King List" whose name is attested from contemporaneous (Early Dynastic I) inscriptions. His successor Aga of Kish, the final king mentioned before Kish fell and kingship was taken to E-ana, also appears in the poem Gilgamesh and Aga.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The next lines, up until Sargon of Akkad, show a steady succession of cities and kings, usually without much detail beyond the lengths of the individual reigns. Every entry is structured exactly the same: the city where kingship is located is named, followed by one or more kings and how long they reigned, followed by a summary and a final line indicating where kingship went next. Lines 134–147 may serve as an example:In Ur, Mesannepada became king; he ruled for 80 years. Meskiagnun, the son of Mesannepada, became king; he ruled for 36 years. Elulu ruled for 25 years. Balulu ruled for 36 years. 4 kings; they ruled for 171 years. Then Ur was defeated and the kingship was taken to Awan.Individual reigns vary in length, from 1200 years for Lugalbanda of Uruk, to six years for another king of Uruk and several kings of Akshak. On average, the number of regnal years decreases down the list. Some city names, such as Uruk, Ur and Kish, appear more than once in the "Sumerian King List". The earlier part of this section mentions several kings who are also known from other literary sources. These kings include Dumuzid the Fisherman and Gilgamesh, although virtually no king from the earlier part of this section appears in inscriptions dating from the actual period in which they were supposed to live. Lines 211–223 describe a dynasty from Mari, which is a city outside Sumer proper but which played an important role in Mesopotamian history during the late third and early second millennia BC. The following third dynasty of Kish consists of a single ruler Kug-Bau ("the woman tavern keeper"), thought to be the only queen listed in the "Sumerian King List". The final two dynasties of this section, the fourth of Kish and the third of Uruk, provide a link to the next section. Sargon of Akkad is mentioned in the "Sumerian King List" as cup-bearer to Ur-zababa of Kish, and he defeated Lugal-zage-si of Uruk before founding his own dynasty.


title: Sumerian King List

text: This section is devoted to the well-known Akkadian ruler Sargon and his successors. After the entry on Shar-kali-sharri, the "Sumerian King List" reads "Then who was king? Who was not king?", suggesting a period of chaos that may reflect the uncertain times during which the Akkadian Empire came to an end. Four kings are mentioned to have ruled for a total of only three years. Of the Akkadian kings mentioned after Shar-kali-sharri, only the names of Dudu and Shu-turul have been attested in inscriptions dating from the Akkadian period. The Akkadian dynasty is succeeded by the fourth dynasty of Uruk, two kings of which, Ur-nigin and his son Ur-gigir, appear in other contemporary inscriptions. Kingship was then taken to the "land" or "army" of Gutium, of which it was said that at first they had no kings and that they ruled themselves for a few years. After this short episode, 21 Gutian kings are listed before the fall of Gutium and kingship was taken to Uruk. Only one ruler is listed during this period of kingship (Utu-hegal), before it moved on to Ur. The so-called Third Dynasty of Ur consisted of 5 kings who ruled between 9 and 46 years. No other details of their exploits are given. The "Sumerian King List" remarks that, after the rule of Ur was abolished, "The very foundation of Sumer was torn out", after which kingship was taken to Isin. The kings of Isin are the final dynasty that is included in the list. The dynasty consisted of 14 kings who ruled between 3 and 33 years. As with the Ur III dynasty, no details are given on the reigns of individual kings.


title: Sumerian King List

text: Some versions of the "Sumerian King List" conclude with a summary of the dynasties after the flood. In this summary, the number of kings and their accumulated regnal years are mentioned for each city, as well as the number of times that city had received kingship: "A total of 12 kings ruled for 396 years, 3 times in Urim." The final line again tallies the numbers for all these dynasties: "There are 11 cities, cities in which the kingship was exercised. A total of 134 kings, who altogether ruled for 28876 + X years."


title: Sumerian King List

text: has observed that, with the exception of the Epic of Gilgamesh, there might not be a single cuneiform text with as much "name recognition" as the "Sumerian King List". The "SKL" might also be among the compositions that have fuelled the most intense debate and controversy among academia. These debates generally focused on when, where and why it was created, and if and how the text can be used in the reconstruction of the political history of Mesopotamia during the third and second millennia BC.


title: Sumerian King List

text: All but one of the surviving versions of the "Sumerian King List" date to the Old Babylonian period, i.e. the early part of the second millennium BC. One version, the "Ur III Sumerian King List" ("USKL") dates to the reign of Shulgi (2084–2037 BC). By carefully comparing the different versions, especially the "USKL" with the much later Old Babylonian versions of the "SKL", it has been shown that the composition that is now known as the "SKL" was probably first created in the Sargonic period in a form very similar to the "USKL". It has even been suggested that this precursor of the "SKL" was not written in Sumerian, but in Akkadian. The original contents of the "USKL", especially the pre-Sargonic part, were probably significantly altered only after the Ur III period, as a reaction to the societal upheaval that resulted from the desintegration of the Ur III state at the end of the third millennium BC. This altering of the composition meant that the original long, uninterrupted list of kings of Kish was cut up in smaller dynasties (e.g. Kish I, Kish II, and so forth), and that other dynasties were inserted. The result was the "SKL" as it is known from Old Babylonian manuscripts such as the Weld-Blundell prism. The cyclical change of kingship from one city to the next became a so-called "Leitmotif", or recurring theme, in the "Sumerian King List".


title: Sumerian King List

text: It has been generally accepted that the main aim was not to provide a historiographical record of the political landscape of ancient Mesopotamia. Instead, it has been suggested that the "SKL", in its various redactions, was used by contemporary rulers to legitimize their claims to power over Babylonia. Steinkeller has argued that the "SKL" was first created during the Akkad dynasty to position Akkad as a direct heir to the hegemony of Kish. Thus, it would make sense to present the predecessors to the Akkadian kings as a long, unbroken line of rulers from Kish. In this way the Akkadian dynasty could legitimize its claims to power over Babylonia by arguing that, from the earliest times onwards, there had always been a single city where kingship was exercised. Later rulers then used the "Sumerian King List" for their own political purposes, amending and adding to the text as they saw fit. This is why, for example, the version recorded on the Weld-Blundell prism ends with the Isin dynasty, suggesting that it was now their turn to rule over Mesopotamia as the rightful inheritors of the Ur III legacy. The use of the "SKL" as political propaganda may also explain why some versions, including the older "USKL", did not contain the antediluvian part of the list. In its original form, the list started with the hegemony of Kish. Some city-states may have been uncomfortable with the preeminent position of Kish. By inserting a section of primordial kings who ruled before a flood, which is only known from some Old Babylonian versions, the importance of Kish could be downplayed.


title: Sumerian King List

text: During much of the 20th century, many scholars accepted the "Sumerian King List" as a historical source of great importance for the reconstruction of the political history of Mesopotamia, despite the problems associated with the text. For example, many scholars have observed that the kings in the early part of the list reigned for unnaturally long time spans. Various approaches have been offered to reconcile these long reigns with a historical time line in which reigns would fall within reasonable human bounds, and with what is known from the archaeological record as well as other textual sources. Thorkild Jacobsen argued in his major 1939 study of the "SKL" that, in principle, all rulers mentioned in the list should be considered historical because their names were taken from older lists that were kept for administrative purposes and could therefore be considered reliable. His solution to the reigns considered too long, then, was to argue that "[t]heir occurrence in our material must be ascribed to a tendency known also among other peoples of antiquity to form very exaggerated ideas of the length of human life in the earliest times of which they were conscious." In order to create a fixed chronology where individual kings could be absolutely dated, Jacobsen replaced time spans considered too long with average reigns of 20–30 years. For example, Etana ruled for 1500 years according to the "SKL", but instead Jacobsen assumed a reign of circa 30 years. In this manner, and by working backwards from reigns whose dates could be independently established by other means, Jacobsen was able to fit all pre-Sargonic kings in a chronology consistent with the dates that were at that time (1939) accepted for the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia. Jacobsen has been criticised for putting too much faith in the reliability of the king list, for making wishful reconstructions and readings of incomplete parts of the list, for ignoring inconsistencies between the "SKL" and other textual evidence, and for ignoring the fact that only very few of the pre-Sargonic rulers have been attested in contemporaneous (i.e. Early Dynastic) inscriptions.


title: Sumerian King List

text: Others have attempted to reconcile the reigns in the "Sumerian" "King List" by arguing that many time spans were actually consciously invented, mathematically derived numbers. Rowton, for example, observed that a majority of the reigns in the Gutian dynasty were 5, 6, or 7 years in length. In the sexagesimal system used at that time, "about 6 years" would be the same as "about 10 years" in a decimal system (i.e. a general round number). This was sufficient evidence for him to conclude that at least these figures were completely artificial. The longer time spans from the first part of the list could also be argued to be artificial: various reigns were multiples of 60 (e.g. Jushur reigned for 600 years, Puannum ruled for 840 years) while others were squares (e.g. Ilku reigned for 900 years (square of 30) while Meshkiangasher ruled for 324 years (square of 18)).


title: Sumerian King List

text: During the last few decades, scholars have taken a more careful approach. For example, many recent handbooks on the archaeology and history of ancient Mesopotamia all acknowledge the problematic nature of the "SKL" and warn that the list's use as a historical document for that period is severely limited up to the point that it should not be used at all. It has been argued, for example, that the omission of certain cities in the list which were known to have been important at the time, such as Lagash and Larsa, was deliberate. Furthermore, the fact that the "SKL" adheres to a strict sequential ordering of kingships which were considered equal means that it does no justice at all to the actual complexities of Mesopotamian political history where different reigns overlapped, or where different rulers or cities were not equally powerful. Recent studies on the "SKL" even go so far as to discredit the composition as a valuable historical source on Early Dynastic Mesopotamia altogether. Important arguments to dismiss the "SKL" as a reliable and valuable source are its nature as a political, ideological text, its long redactional history, and the fact that out of the many pre-Sargonic kings listed, only seven have been attested in contemporary Early Dynastic inscriptions. The final volume on the history and philology of third millennium BC Mesopotamia of the ESF-funded ARCANE-project (Associated Regional Chronologies for the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean), for example, did not list any of the pre-Sargonic rulers from the "SKL" in its chronological tables unless their existence was corroborated by Early Dynastic inscriptions.


title: Sumerian King List

text: Thus, in the absence of independent sources from the Early Dynastic period itself, the pre-Sargonic part of the "SKL" must be considered fictional. Many of the rulers in the pre-Sargonic part (i.e. prior to Sargon of Akkad) of the list must therefore be considered as purely fictional or mythological characters to which reigns of hundreds of years were assigned. However, there is a small group of pre-Sargonic rulers in the "SKL" whose names have been attested in Early Dynastic inscriptions.This group consists of seven rulers: Enmebaragesi, Gilgamesh, Mesannepada, Meskiagnun, Elulu, Enshakushanna and Lugal-zage-si. It has also been shown that several kings did not rule sequentially as described by the "Sumerian King List", but rather contemporaneously. Starting with the Akkadian rulers, but especially for the Ur III and Isin dynasties, the "SKL" becomes much more reliable. Not only are most of the kings attested in other contemporaneous documents, but the reigns attributed to them in the "SKL" are more or less in line with what can be established from those other sources. This is probably due to the fact that the compilers of the "SKL" could rely on lists of year names, which came in regular use during the Akkadian period. Other sources may have included votive and victory inscriptions.


title: Sumerian King List

text: However, while the "SKL" has little value for the study on Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, it continues to be an important document for the study on the Sargonic to Old Babylonian periods. The "Sumerian King List" offers scholars a window into how Old Babylonian kings and scribes viewed their own history, how they perceived the concept of kingship, and how they could have used it to further their own goals. For example, it has been noted that the king list is unique among Sumerian compositions in there being no divine intervention in the process of dynastic change. Also, the style and contents of the "Sumerian King List" certainly influenced later compositions such as the "Curse of Akkad", the "Lamentation over Sumer and Akkad", later king lists such as the "Assyrian King List", and the "Babyloniaca" by Berossus.


title: Sumerian King List

text: Early dates are approximate, and are based on available archaeological data. For most of the pre-Akkadian rulers listed, the king list is itself the lone source of information. Beginning with Lugal-zage-si and the Third Dynasty of Uruk (which was defeated by Sargon of Akkad), a better understanding of how subsequent rulers fit into the chronology of the ancient Near East can be deduced. The short chronology is used here.


title: Sumerian King List

text: None of the following predynastic antediluvian rulers have been verified as historical by archaeological excavations, epigraphical inscriptions or otherwise. While there is no evidence they ever reigned as such, the Sumerians purported them to have lived in the mythical era before the great deluge.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The "antediluvian" reigns were measured in Sumerian numerical units known as "sars" (units of 3,600), "ners" (units of 600), and "sosses" (units of 60). Attempts have been made to map these numbers into more reasonable regnal lengths.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The First dynasty of Lagash (c. 2500 – c. 2271 BC) is not mentioned in the King List, though it is well known from inscriptions


title: Sumerian King List

text: Other rulers of Adab are known, besides Lugal-Ane-mundu, but they are not mentioned in the Sumerian King List.


title: Sumerian King List

text: The Second dynasty of Lagash (before c. 2093–2046 BC (short)) is not mentioned in the King List, though it is well known from inscriptions.


title: The Fruit of Evolution

text: Seiichi Hiiragi is an overweight high school student who is bullied by his classmates for being a "loser." One day, his entire school is suddenly transported to a video game-like world of swords and sorcery. When he accidentally eats "the Fruit of Evolution," not only does his physical appearance change, but also his life as a successful "winner" begins.


title: The Fruit of Evolution

text: The series, written by Miku, began serialization online in January 2014 on the user-generated novel publishing website Shōsetsuka ni Narō. It was later acquired by Futabasha, who have published it as a light novel with illustrations by U35 in fourteen volumes since September 2014 under their Monster Bunko imprint. Hanashi Media has licensed the light novel for an English release.


title: The Fruit of Evolution

text: A manga adaptation with art by Sorano has been serialized via Futabasha's digital publication "Web Comic Action" since September 2017, and it moved to the "Gaugau Monster" website in December 2019. It has been collected in eight "tankōbon" volumes.


title: The Fruit of Evolution

text: An anime television series adaptation was announced on January 28, 2021. The series was animated by Hotline, with Yoshiaki Okumura directing the series, Gigaemon Ichikawa overseeing the scripts, Minami Eda designing the characters, and Hifumi, Inc. composing the series' music. Feel and Children's Playground Entertainment produced the series. It aired from October 5 to December 21, 2021, on TV Tokyo, BS-TV Tokyo, and AT-X. Yoshino Nanjō performed the opening theme "Evolution:", while Poppin'Party performed the ending theme "Moonlight Walk". Crunchyroll licensed the series outside of Asia. Crunchyroll began streaming an English dub on May 5, 2022.


title: The Fruit of Evolution

text: On April 1, 2022, it was announced that the series would be receiving a second season. The second season is directed by Shige Fukase, with Yoshiaki Okumura serving as chief director, Iroha Mizuki and Nobuhide Hayashi designing the characters, and Hiroyasu Yano, Alisa Okehazama and Yūki Saitō composing the music. It will premiere on January 14, 2023. The opening theme is "Evolution" by Nano, while the ending theme is "Adore Me" by Erii Yamazaki.


title: Golden rice

text: Golden Rice is a variety of rice ("Oryza sativa") produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of the rice. It is intended to produce a fortified food to be grown and consumed in areas with a shortage of dietary vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency causes xerophthalmia, a range of eye conditions from night blindness to more severe clinical outcomes such as keratomalacia and corneal scars, and permanent blindness. It also increases risk of mortality from measles and diarrhea in children. In 2013, the prevalence of deficiency was the highest in sub-Saharan Africa (48%; 25–75), and South Asia (44%; 13–79).


title: Golden rice

text: Although golden rice has met significant opposition from environmental and anti-globalisation activists, more than 100 Nobel laureates in 2016 encouraged use of genetically modified golden rice which can produce up to 23 times as much beta-carotene as the original golden rice.


title: Golden rice

text: In the 1990s, Peter Bramley discovered that a single phytoene desaturase gene (bacterial "CrtI") can be used to produce lycopene from phytoene in GM tomato, rather than having to introduce multiple carotene desaturases that are normally used by higher plants. Lycopene is then cyclized to beta-carotene by the endogenous cyclase in golden rice. The scientific details of the rice were first published in 2000, the product of an eight-year project by Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg.


title: Golden rice

text: The first field trials of golden rice cultivars were conducted by Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in 2004. Additional trials were conducted in the Philippines, Taiwan, and in Bangladesh (2015). Field testing provided an accurate measurement of nutritional value and enabled feeding tests to be performed. Preliminary results from field tests showed field-grown golden rice produces 4 to 5 times more beta-carotene than golden rice grown under greenhouse conditions.


title: Golden rice

text: As of 2018, breeders at the Philippine Rice Research Institute, the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, and the Indonesian Centre for Rice Research were developing golden rice versions of existing rice varieties used with their local farmers, retaining the same yield, pest resistance, and grain qualities. Golden rice seeds may cost farmers the same as other rice varieties.


title: Golden rice

text: In 2018, Canada and the United States approved golden rice, with Health Canada and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declaring it safe for consumption. This followed a 2016 decision where the FDA had ruled that the beta-carotene content in golden rice did not provide sufficient amounts of vitamin A for US markets. Health Canada declared that golden rice would not affect allergies, and that the nutrient contents were the same as in common rice varieties, except for the intended high levels of provitamin A.


title: Golden rice

text: In 2019, golden rice was approved for use as human food and animal feed or for processing in the Philippines. On 21 July 2021, the Philippines became the first country to officially issue the biosafety permit for commercially propagating vitamin A-infused golden rice. The approval came as the first commercial propagation authorisation of genetically engineered rice in South and Southeast Asia. As a result of the permission, golden rice can be grown on a commercial scale in accordance with the terms and conditions specified by the Philippines government.


title: Golden rice

text: The "psy" and "crtI" genes were transferred into the rice nuclear genome and placed under the control of an endosperm-specific promoter, so that they are only expressed in the endosperm. The exogenous "lcy" gene has a transit peptide sequence attached, so it is targeted to the plastid, where geranylgeranyl diphosphate is formed. The bacterial "crtI" gene was an important inclusion to complete the pathway, since it can catalyse multiple steps in the synthesis of carotenoids up to lycopene, while these steps require more than one enzyme in plants. The end product of the engineered pathway is lycopene, but if the plant accumulated lycopene, the rice would be red. Recent analysis has shown the plant's endogenous enzymes process the lycopene to beta-carotene in the endosperm, giving the rice the distinctive yellow colour for which it is named. The original golden rice was called SGR1, and under greenhouse conditions it produced 1.6 µg/g of carotenoids.


title: Golden rice

text: In 2005, a team of researchers at Syngenta produced Golden Rice 2. They combined the phytoene synthase (psy) gene from maize with crtl gene from the original golden rice. Golden Rice 2 produces 23 times more carotenoids than golden rice (up to 37 µg/g) because psy gene of maize is the most effective gene for carotenoid synthesis, and preferentially accumulates beta-carotene (up to 31 µg/g of the 37 µg/g of carotenoids).


title: Golden rice

text: The research that led to Golden Rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). Estimates show that around 1.02 billion people are severely affected by micronutrient deficiencies globally, with vitamin A to be the most deficient nutrient in the body. In 2012, the World Health Organization reported that about 250 million preschool children are affected by VAD, and that providing those children with vitamin A could prevent about a third of all under-five deaths, which amounts to up to 2.7 million children that could be saved from dying unnecessarily. The World Health Organization has classified vitamin A deficiency as a public health problem affecting about one third of children aged 6 to 59 months in 2013, with the highest rates in sub-Saharan Africa (48 per cent) and South Asia (44 per cent).


title: Golden rice

text: VAS programs began in the 1990s in response to evidence demonstrating the association between VAD and increased childhood mortality. Between 1990 and 2013, more than 40 efficacy studies of VAS in children 6–59 months of age were conducted, and two systematic reviews and meta-analyses have concluded that VA supplements can considerably reduce mortality and morbidity during childhood. As of 2017, more than 80 countries worldwide are implementing universal VA supplementation (VAS) programs targeted to children 6–59 months of age through semi-annual national campaigns. Periodic, high-dose vitamin A supplementation is a proven, low-cost intervention which has been shown to reduce all-cause mortality by 12 to 24 per cent, and is therefore an important program in support of efforts to reduce child mortality. However, UNICEF and a number of NGOs involved in supplementation note more frequent low-dose supplementation is preferable.


title: Golden rice

text: As many children in VAD-affected countries rely on rice as a staple food, genetic modification to make rice produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene was seen as a simple and less expensive alternative to ongoing vitamin supplements or an increase in the consumption of green vegetables or animal products. Initial analyses of the potential nutritional benefits of golden rice suggested consumption of golden rice would not eliminate the problems of vitamin A deficiency, but could complement other supplementation. Golden Rice 2 contains sufficient provitamin A to provide the entire dietary requirement via daily consumption of some 75g per day.


title: Golden rice

text: Vitamin A deficiency is usually coupled to an unbalanced diet. Since carotenes are hydrophobic, sufficient fat must be present in the diet for golden rice (or most other vitamin A supplements) to alleviate vitamin A deficiency. Moreover, this claim referred to an early cultivar of Golden Rice; one bowl of the latest version provides 60% of RDA for healthy children. The RDA levels advocated in developed countries are far in excess of the amounts needed to prevent blindness.


title: Golden rice

text: In 2009, results of a clinical trial of golden rice with adult volunteers from the US were published in the "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition". The trial concluded that "beta-carotene derived from golden rice is effectively converted to vitamin A in humans". A summary for the American Society for Nutrition suggested that "Golden Rice could probably supply 50% of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of vitamin A from a very modest amount – perhaps a cup – of rice, if consumed daily. This amount is well within the consumption habits of most young children and their mothers". Beta-carotene is found and consumed in many nutritious foods eaten around the world, including fruits and vegetables. Beta-carotene in food is a safe source of vitamin A.


title: Golden rice

text: In August 2012, Tufts University and others published research on golden rice in the "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" showing that the beta-carotene produced by golden rice is as effective as beta-carotene in oil at providing vitamin A to children. The study stated that "recruitment processes and protocol were approved".. However, in 2015 the journal retracted the study, claiming that the researchers had acted unethically when providing Chinese children golden rice without their parents' consent.


title: Golden rice

text: A simulated analysis study by De Moura et al. (2016) suggests that beta carotene rice (i.e. Golden Rice) could improve vitamin A intake and could reduce the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency among women and children. The molecular-genetic characterisation of GR2E rice, including the assessment of potential toxic or allergic reaction to the newly expressed ZmPSY1 and CRTI proteins, when considered together with the comparative compositional assessment10, support the conclusion that food derived from rice varieties containing event GR2E is as safe as food derived from conventional rice varieties.


title: Golden rice

text: Critics of genetically engineered crops have raised various concerns. An early issue was that Golden Rice originally did not have sufficient beta-carotene content. This problem was solved by the advancing of GR2E event. The speed at which beta-carotene degrades once the rice is harvested, and how much remains after cooking are contested. However, a 2009 study concluded that beta-carotene from golden rice is effectively converted into vitamin A in humans.


title: Golden rice

text: Greenpeace opposes the use of any patented genetically modified organisms in agriculture and opposes the cultivation of golden rice, claiming it will open the door to more widespread use of GMOs. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has emphasised the non-commercial nature of their project, stating that "None of the companies listed ... are involved in carrying out the research and development activities of IRRI or its partners in Golden Rice, and none of them will receive any royalty or payment from the marketing or selling of golden rice varieties developed by IRRI."


title: Golden rice

text: Vandana Shiva, an Indian anti-GMO activist, argued the problem was not the plant per se, but potential issues with loss of biodiversity. Shiva argued that golden rice proponents were obscuring the limited availability of diverse and nutritionally adequate food. Other groups argued that a varied diet containing foods rich in beta-carotene such as sweet potato, leaf vegetables and fruit would provide children with sufficient vitamin A. However, Keith West of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has said that foodstuffs containing vitamin A are often unavailable, only available at certain seasons, or are too expensive for poor families to obtain.


title: Golden rice

text: In 2008, WHO malnutrition expert Francesco Branca cited the lack of real-world studies and uncertainty about how many people will use golden rice, concluding "giving out supplements, fortifying existing foods with vitamin A, and teaching people to grow carrots or certain leafy vegetables are, for now, more promising ways to fight the problem". Author Michael Pollan, who had criticized the product in 2001, being unimpressed by the benefits, expressed support for the continuation of the research in 2013.


title: Golden rice

text: In 2012, controversy surrounded a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The study, involving feeding GM rice to 6 to 8 year old children in China, was later found to have violated human research rules of both Tufts University and the federal government. Subsequent reviews found no evidence of safety problems with the study, but found issues with insufficient consent forms, unapproved changes to study protocol, and lack of approval from a China-based ethics review board. Additionally, the GM rice used was brought into China illegally.


title: Golden rice

text: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports the use of genetically modified organisms in agricultural development and supports the International Rice Research Institute in developing golden rice. In June 2016, 107 Nobel laureates signed a letter urging Greenpeace and its supporters to abandon their campaign against GMOs, and against golden rice in particular.


title: Golden rice

text: In May 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of golden rice for human consumption, stating: "Based on the information IRRI has presented to FDA, we have no further questions concerning human or animal food derived from GR2E rice at this time." This marks the fourth national health organisation to approve the use of golden rice in 2018, joining Australia, Canada and New Zealand who issued their assessments earlier in the year.


title: Golden rice

text: In December 2021, an opinion piece in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America called on regulators to "allow Golden Rice to save lives", which the authors say has been delayed due to "fear and false accusations", leading to estimated 266'000 lives lost per year due to vitamin A deficiency.


title: Golden rice

text: On August 8, 2013, an experimental plot of Golden Rice being developed by IRRI and DA-PhilRice in Camarines Sur province of the Philippines was uprooted by protesters. British author Mark Lynas reported in Slate that the vandalism was carried out by a group of activists led by "Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas" (KMP) (unofficial translation: "Farmers' Movement of the Philippines").


title: Golden rice

text: A recommendation was made that golden rice be distributed free to subsistence farmers. Free licenses for developing countries were granted quickly due to the positive publicity that golden rice received, particularly in "Time" magazine in July 2000. Monsanto Company was one of the companies to grant free licences for related patents owned by the company. The cutoff between humanitarian and commercial use was set at US$10,000. Therefore, as long as a farmer or subsequent user of golden rice genetics would not make more than $10,000 per year, no royalties would need to be paid. In addition, farmers would be permitted to keep and replant seed.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her twelfth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine "Pictorial Review". Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for "Main Street", the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters. The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: "The Age of Innocence", which was set in the time of Wharton's childhood, was a softer and gentler work than "The House of Mirth", which Wharton had published in 1905. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of "The Age of Innocence" that it had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Scholars and readers alike agree that "The Age of Innocence" is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Wharton was raised in the old world of rigid and proper New York society which features in the story. She had spent her middle years, including the whole of World War I, in Europe, where the devastation of a new kind of mechanized warfare was felt most deeply. As explained by Millicent Bell in the Cambridge companion to Wharton, ""The Age of Innocence" was composed and first read in the aftermath of [Theodore] Roosevelt's death and in the immediate wake of World War I. We frame the ending remembering the multiple losses... not only the loss of Roosevelt but the destruction of the prewar world and all that Wharton valued in it."


title: The Age of Innocence

text: "The Age of Innocence" centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York society, it never develops into an outright condemnation of the institution. The novel is noted for Wharton's attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, as well as for the social tragedy of its plot. Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she had lived in that world and had seen it change dramatically by the end of World War I.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward machinations. It is believed to have been drawn from the popular painting "A Little Girl" by Sir Joshua Reynolds that later became known as "The Age of Innocence" and was widely reproduced as the commercial face of childhood in the later half of the 18th century. The title, while ironic, was not as caustic as the title of the story featured in "The House of Mirth", which Wharton had published in 1905.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir of one of New York City's most illustrious families, happily anticipates his highly desirable marriage to the sheltered and beautiful May Welland. Yet he finds reason to doubt his choice of bride after the appearance of Countess Ellen Olenska, May's exotic and beautiful cousin. Olenska strikes Archer as the opposite of the innocent and ignorant May Welland. Ellen has returned to New York from Europe after scandalously separating herself (per rumor) from a disastrous marriage to a Polish count. At first, Ellen's arrival and its potential taint on the reputation of his bride-to-be's family disturbs Newland, but he becomes intrigued by the worldly Ellen, who brazenly flouts New York society's fastidious rules. As Newland's admiration for the countess grows, so do his doubts about marrying May, a perfect product of Old New York society; his match with May no longer seems the ideal fate he had imagined.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Ellen's decision to divorce Count Olenski causes a social crisis for the other members of her family, who are terrified of scandal and disgrace. Living apart can be tolerated, but divorce is unacceptable. To save the Welland family's reputation, a law partner of Newland asks him to dissuade Countess Olenska from going through with the divorce. He succeeds, but in the process comes to care for her. Afraid of falling in love with Ellen, Newland begs May to elope and accelerate their wedding date, but she refuses.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Some weeks later, Newland tells Ellen he loves her; Ellen corresponds, but is horrified that their love will hurt May, so does not want him to leave May for her. Newland receives May's telegram agreeing to wed sooner.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Newland and May marry. He tries unsuccessfully to forget Ellen. His society marriage is mediocre, and the social life he once found absorbing has become empty and joyless. Though Ellen lives in Washington and has remained distant, he is unable to cease loving her. Their paths cross while he and May are in Newport, Rhode Island. Newland discovers that Count Olenski wishes Ellen to return to him, but she has refused, although her family wants her to reconcile with her husband and return to Europe. Frustrated by her independence, the family has cut off her money, as the count had already done.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Newland desperately seeks a way to leave May and be with Ellen, obsessed with how to finally be with her. Despairing of ever making Ellen his wife, he urges her to run away with him, but she refuses. Then Ellen is recalled to New York City to care for her sick grandmother, who accepts her decision to remain separated and agrees to reinstate her allowance.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Back in New York and under renewed pressure from Newland, Ellen relents and agrees to meet with him in secret to consummate their relationship. Shortly after their conversation, however, Newland discovers that Ellen has instead decided to return to Europe. When May announces that she and Newland are throwing a farewell party for Ellen, Newland makes up his mind to abandon May and follow Ellen to Europe. That night, after the party, Newland resolves to tell May he is leaving her for Ellen. She interrupts him to tell him that she learned that morning that she is pregnant; she reveals that she had told Ellen of her pregnancy two weeks earlier, despite not being sure of it at the time. The implication is that May did so because she suspected the affair and that this is Ellen's reason for returning to Europe. Hopelessly trapped, Newland decides to remain with May and not to follow Ellen, surrendering his love for the sake of his child.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Twenty-six years later, after May's death, Newland and his eldest son are in Paris. The son, learning that his mother's cousin lives there, has arranged to visit Ellen in her Paris apartment. Newland is stunned at the prospect of seeing Ellen again. On arriving outside the apartment building, Newland sends up his son alone to meet Ellen, while he waits outside, watching the balcony of her apartment. Newland considers going up, but in the end decides not to; he walks back to his hotel without seeing her. Newland's final words about the love affair are "It's more real to me here than if I went up."


title: The Age of Innocence

text: The story's protagonist is a young, popular, and successful lawyer living with his mother and sister in an elegant New York City house. Since childhood, his life has been shaped by the customs and expectations of upper-class New York City society. His engagement to May Welland is one in a string of accomplishments. At the story's start, he is proud and content to dream about a traditional marriage in which he will be the husband-teacher and she the wife-student. His life changes when he meets Countess Ellen Olenska. Through his relationship with her—first friendship, then love—he begins questioning the values on which he was raised. He sees the sexual inequality of New York society and the shallowness of its customs, and struggles to balance social commitment to May with love for Ellen. He cannot find a place for their love in the intricate, judgmental web of New York society. Throughout the story's progress, he transgresses the boundaries of acceptable behavior for love of Ellen: first following her to Skuytercliff, then Boston, and finally deciding to follow her to Europe (though he later changes his mind). In the end, though, Newland Archer finds that the only place for their love is in his memories. Some scholars see Wharton most projected onto Newland's character, rather than Ellen Olenska.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Newland Archer's fiancée, then wife. Raised to be a perfect wife and mother, she follows and perfectly obeys all of society's customs. Mostly, she is the shallow, uninterested and uninteresting young woman that New York society requires. When they are in St. Augustine, though, May gives Newland a rare glimpse of the maturity and compassion he had previously ignored. She offers to release him from their engagement so he can marry the woman he truly loves, thinking he wants to be with Mrs. Rushworth, a married woman with whom he had recently ended a love affair. When he assures May that he loves only her, May appears to trust him, at least at first. Yet after their marriage, she suspects that Newland is Ellen's lover. Nonetheless, May pretends to be happy before society, maintaining the illusion that she and he have the perfect marriage expected of them. Her unhappiness activates her manipulative nature, and Newland does not see it until too late. To drive Ellen away from him, May tells Ellen of her pregnancy before she is certain of it. Yet there still is compassion in May, even in their mediocre marriage's long years after Ellen's leaving. After May's death, Newland Archer learns she had always known of his continued love for Ellen; as May lay dying, she told their son Dallas that the children could always trust their father, Newland, because he surrendered the thing most meaningful to him out of loyalty to their marriage. Outwardly, May is a picture of Innocence.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: May's cousin and Mrs. Manson Mingott's granddaughter. She became a countess by marrying Polish Count Olenski, a European nobleman. Her husband was allegedly cruel and abusive, stole Ellen's fortune and had affairs with other women. When the story begins, Ellen has fled her unhappy marriage, lived in Venice with her husband's secretary, and has returned to her family in New York City. She is a free spirit who helps Newland Archer see beyond narrow New York society. She treats her maid, Nastasia, as an equal, offering the servant her own cape before sending her out on an errand. She attends parties with disreputable people such as Julius Beaufort and Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and she invites Newland, the fiancé of her cousin May, to visit her. Ellen suffers as much as Newland from their impossible love, but she is willing to live in emotional limbo so long as they can love each other at a distance. Ellen's love for Newland drives her important decisions: dropping divorce from Count Olenski, remaining in America, and offering Newland choice of sexual consummation only once, and then disappearing from his life. Her conscience and responsibility to family complicate her love for Newland. When she learns of May's pregnancy, Ellen immediately decides to leave America, refusing Newland's attempt to follow her to Europe, and so allow cousin May to start her family with her husband Newland. The reception of Ellen's character has changed over time. From a willful temptress to a fabulously independent woman, far ahead of her time, one thing is for certain: “Ellen has only to walk alone across a drawing room to offend its definitions.”


title: The Age of Innocence

text: The matriarch of the powerful Mingott family, and grandmother to Ellen and May. She was born Catherine Spicer, to an inconsequential family. Widowed at 28, she has ensured her family's social position through her own shrewdness and force of character. She controls her family: at Newland's request, she has May and Mrs. Welland agree to an earlier wedding date. She controls the money—withholding Ellen's living allowance (when the family is angry with Ellen), and having niece Regina Beaufort ask for money when in financial trouble. Mrs. Mingott is a maverick in the polite world of New York society, at times pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior, such as receiving guests in her house's ground floor, though society associates that practice with women of questionable morals. Her welcoming Ellen is viewed skeptically, and she insists the rest of the family support Ellen. Mrs. Mingott was inspired by Edith Wharton's own portly great-great-aunt, Mary Mason Jones, who is said to have given rise to the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses", due to her belief that fashionable society would always strive to keep up with her.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: May's mother, who has raised her daughter to be a proper society lady. May's dullness, lack of imagination, and rigid views of appropriate and inappropriate behavior are a consequence of this influence. Augusta has effectively trained her husband, the weak-willed Mr. Welland, to conform to her desires and wishes. Mrs. Welland is the driving force behind May's commitment to a long engagement. Without her mother's influence, May might have agreed sooner to Newland's request for an earlier wedding date. After a few years of marriage, Newland Archer foresees in May the attributes of his mother-in-law — a woman who is stolid, unimaginative, and dull. Later he comes to experience the same molding by May which was imposed upon Mr. Welland.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: One of the most prominent themes that can be seen throughout the text is the idea of wealth and social class. The characters take pride in their social standings and those that come from "old money" feel threatened by those that are coming from "new money". The characters' lives revolve around staying up to date on the latest fashion, gatherings, appearances, etc. Being accepted by this high society is the most important thing to the people in this novel and they're willing to do anything to be accepted. Being accepted by high-class acquaintances is another common theme that is displayed throughout this novel. Another theme that is clear in the novel is love, whether it be the love between Newland Archer and May Wellend, or the undeniable love and lust between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska. Newland Archer's infatuation with May Welland's innocence can't be missed in the beginning scenes of the novel. The theme of innocence changes throughout the novel, as May states she is pregnant only to ensure that Ellen stays away from Newland.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Helen Killoran explains in "The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton" that critics have always admired Wharton's craftsmanship, her attention to structure, and her subtle ironies, along with her description of interiors (attributed to her time as an interior designer). In the decades since the book's publication, critics have placed more stress on the portrayal of money and class distinctions in the book.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Ellen Olenska and May Welland have also long been at the heart of critical discussion. Originally perceived as having done the right thing by talking about her pregnancy in order to save her marriage, May Welland can also be seen as manipulative rather than sympathetically desperate. Ellen Olenska brings up the general "woman question" in modern literary criticism.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Rather than focusing on the lavish lifestyle which Newland Archer has not had to work for, some modern readers identify with his grim outlook.


title: The Age of Innocence

text: In a master's thesis on the novel from 2005, Alisa Mariva DeBorde of the University of South Florida noted "Ms. Wharton often employed dichotomy in her own life: her role as socialite and author, woman of old New York and European maverick, and her life as spouse or beloved. Compartmentalizing her life’s roles prevented her from having to compromise the distinct qualities of each paradigm. Similarly, in "The Age of Innocence", Ellen and May are completely opposite representations of life and culture in the 1870s who cannot happily coexist together. Wharton draws this contrast by painting their psychological landscapes, relying heavily on the motifs of water and fire, elements that if combined are mutually destructive."


title: The Age of Innocence

text: Hillary Kelly suggests that Wharton's "status made her story more than believable—it made the story real ... Novelists before Wharton understood that storytelling was an act of exposure, but she built it into the architecture of "The Age of Innocence" and weaponized it."


title: 2021–22 PGA Tour

text: The 2021–22 PGA Tour was the 107th season of the PGA Tour, and the 55th since separating from the PGA of America. The season began on September 16, 2021. The 2022 FedEx Cup Playoffs began on August 11, and concluded on August 28, 2022.


title: 2021–22 PGA Tour

text: Preceding the first event of the LIV Golf Invitational Series in London, the PGA Tour announced on June 1, 2022, that they would sanction players who competed in the event. Seventeen PGA Tour members played in the event, including major champions Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Sergio García, Martin Kaymer, Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel and Graeme McDowell, and former world number one Lee Westwood. Nine of the players resigned from the tour. On June 9, the tour announced that all members participating in the first LIV tournament, including those who had resigned, were no longer eligible to compete in tour events or the Presidents Cup.


title: 2021–22 PGA Tour

text: Seven more PGA Tour members joined LIV Golf for the series' second event in Portland, Oregon, including major champions Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, and Patrick Reed (who resigned from the tour). The PGA Tour confirmed their suspensions shortly following the start of that event.


title: 2021–22 PGA Tour

text: In late July, the tour created a FedExCup Playoffs Eligibility ranking list which did not include the suspended players. Ten players who finished inside the top-125 of the standard FedExCup Standings were excluded; they were Talor Gooch, Jason Kokrak, Matt Jones, Hudson Swafford, Matthew Wolff, Abraham Ancer, Carlos Ortiz, Brooks Koepka, Charles Howell III, and Pat Perez. Three of these (Gooch, Jones and Swafford) failed in their attempt to gain a temporary restraining order to allow them to compete in the playoffs.


title: 2021–22 PGA Tour

text: The following events were sanctioned by the PGA Tour, but did not carry FedEx Cup points or official money, nor were wins official.


title: 2021–22 PGA Tour

text: Tour Championship starting score (to par), based on position in the FedEx Cup rankings after the BMW Championship:


title: Polish alphabet

text: The Polish alphabet (Polish: "alfabet polski", "abecadło") is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters with diacritics: the "kreska", or acute accent ("ć", "ń", "ó", "ś", "ź"); the overdot, or "kropka" ("ż"); the tail, or "ogonek" ("ą", "ę"); and the stroke ("ł"). The letters "q", "v", and "x", which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. However, prior to the standardization of the Polish language, the letter "x" was sometimes used in place of "ks".


title: Polish alphabet

text: Modified variations of the Polish alphabet are used for writing Silesian and Kashubian, whereas the Sorbian languages use a mixture of the Polish and Czech orthographies.


title: Polish alphabet

text: The letters "q", "v", and "x" are not used in any native Polish words and are mostly found in foreign words (such as place names) and commercial names. In loanwords they are usually replaced by "k", "w", and "ks", respectively (as in "nikab" 'niqab', "kwark" 'quark', "weranda" 'veranda', "sawanna" 'savanna', "ekstra" 'extra', "oksymoron" 'oxymoron'), although some loanwords retain their original spelling (e.g., "quiz", "virga"), and in a few cases both spellings are accepted (such as "veto" or "weto", "volt" or "wolt"). In addition, they can occasionally be found in common abbreviations (e.g., "ksiądz" 'priest' can be abbreviated as either "ks." or "x."). As a result, they are sometimes included in the Polish alphabet (bringing the total number of letters in the alphabet to 35); when included, they take their usual positions from the Latin alphabet ("q" after "p"; "v" and "x" either side of "w").


title: Polish alphabet

text: The following table lists the letters of the alphabet, their Polish names (see also Names of letters below), the Polish phonemes which they usually represent, rough English (or other) equivalents to the sounds of those phonemes, and other possible pronunciations. Diacritics are shown for the sake of clarity. For more information about the sounds, see Polish phonology.


title: Polish alphabet

text: "É" is a historical letter for native words prior to the 1891 spelling reform by the Academy of Learning, e.g., "cztéry", "papiéż" (now "cztery" 'four', "papież" 'pope'). Now it is used in some loanwords, e.g., "attaché", "exposé", "chargé d’affaires".


title: Polish alphabet

text: For digraphs and other rules about spelling and the corresponding pronunciations, see Polish orthography.


title: Polish alphabet

text: The names of the letters are not normally written out in the way shown above, except as part of certain lexicalized abbreviations, such as Pekao (or PeKaO), the name of a bank, which represents the spoken form of the abbreviation P.K.O. (for "Polska Kasa Opieki").


title: Polish alphabet

text: Some letters may be referred to in alternative ways, often consisting of just the sound of the letter. For example, y may be called "y" rather than "igrek" (from 'Greek i').


title: Polish alphabet

text: When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters. For example, the letter h may be referred to as "samo ha" ('h alone') to distinguish it from ch "(ce ha)". The letter ż may be called "żet z kropką" or "zet z kropką" ('z with an overdot') to distinguish it from rz "(er zet)". The letter u may be called "u otwarte" ('open u', a reference to its graphical form) or "u zwykłe" ('normal u') to distinguish it from ó, which is sometimes called "u zamknięte" ('closed u') or "ó kreskowane"/"o kreskowane"/"o z kreską" ('dashed ó', 'dashed o', 'o with a dash').


title: Polish alphabet

text: Note that (unlike in languages such as French, Spanish, and German) Polish letters with diacritics are treated as fully independent letters in alphabetical ordering. For example, "być" comes after "bycie". The diacritic letters also have their own sections in dictionaries (words beginning with "ć" are not usually listed under "c").


title: Polish alphabet

text: Digraphs are not given any special treatment in alphabetical ordering. For example, "ch" is treated simply as "c" followed by "h" and not as a single letter as in Czech.


title: Polish alphabet

text: There are several systems for encoding the Polish alphabet for computers. All letters of the Polish alphabet are included in Unicode, and thus Unicode-based encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 can be used. The Polish alphabet is completely included in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. The standard 8-bit character encoding for the Polish alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), although both ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) and ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) encodings include glyphs of the Polish alphabet. Microsoft's format for encoding the Polish alphabet is Windows-1250.


title: Polish alphabet

text: The Polish letters which are not present in the English alphabet have the following HTML codes and Unicode codepoints:


title: Polish alphabet

text: A common test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters is the nonsensical "Zażółć gęślą jaźń" ('Yellow the ego with/of a gusle').


title: Dafabet

text: Dafabet is an online betting site. The company was founded on 7 November 2004 and is headquartered in Makati, Philippines.


title: Dafabet

text: Dafabet was founded on November 7, 2004, in Makati, Philippines under the subsidiary of the privately-owned company AsianBGE licensed by Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) and regulated by First Cagayan Leisure and Resorts (FCLRC). The company operated first in Asian countries then later advertised its UK presence by sponsoring football clubs such as Bournemouth, Norwich City, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Sunderland FC, Burnley FC, Everton FC and Celtic FC. It is sponsoring Pakistan Cricket Series in Pakistan as well. The company owns a remote UK license under AsianBGE (Isle of Man) Limited, managed and regulated by The Gambling Commission in Great Britain.


title: Dafabet

text: Dafabet features In-Play gaming for sports events such as FIFA World Cup, Premier League, Barclays Premier League, National Basketball Association, US Open, and Ultimate Fighting Championship. It has a partnership with ONEworks to process customer data. Dafabet provides live streaming and broadcasting of sporting events on the internet in order for the players to ensure the right outcomes. Its gaming platform is provided by Playtech, a leading software provider for Dafabet's casino online games, poker, slots and arcade games.


title: Dafabet

text: Dafabet offers an online affiliate programme for website owners and advertisers, who can earn commissions by referring players to Dafabet’s betting platform.


title: Dafabet

text: eGaming Review Magazine releases an annual list of the top 50 e-gaming operators in the world and after recognizing its growth and fulfilling a set potential, Dafabet made the top-half of the list at number 21 in 2013, the first time since it launched in 2004. In 2014, eGaming Review Magazine again announced their rankings of the top 50 e-gaming operators in the world and this time around, Dafabet landed in at number 19. In 2015, Dafabet managed to maintain brand presence in Europe although it went down in e-gaming top 50 and ended at 23rd.


title: Dafabet

text: Dafabet has partnered with athletes and commentators including footballer Alan Shearer, snooker player Jimmy White, and footballer Steve McManaman.


title: Dafabet

text: Among British football teams, it has partnered with Everton and West Bromwich Albion in 2012–2013; Aston Villa F.C. in 2013–2014 and 2014–2015; Celtic in 2016–2017 and five subsequent seasons; Burnley FC for 2016–2017; Sunderland FC for several years, ending in the 2017–2018 season; Fulham F.C for the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 seasons; Norwich City F.C. for three seasons starting with 2019–2020; and AFC Bournemouth for two seasons starting with 2022-2023. Aston Villa, Celtic, and Fulham put Dafabet's logo on the front of the players' shirts.


title: Dafabet

text: In snooker, Dafabet was the principal sponsor of Players Tour Championship 2012/2013 – Finals, the 2014 Masters, and the 2014 World Snooker Championship.


title: Dafabet

text: In 2015, Dafabet became the lead sponsor of eSports team Fnatic, with their logo placed on the middle of player's shirts.


title: Joe Masseria

text: Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria (; January 17, 1886April 15, 1931) was an early Italian-American Mafia boss in New York City. He was boss of what is now called the Genovese crime family, one of the New York City Mafia's Five Families, from 1922 to 1931. In 1930, he battled in the Castellammarese War to take over the criminal activities in New York City. The war ended with his murder on April 15, 1931, in a hit ordered by his own lieutenant, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, in an agreement with rival faction head Salvatore Maranzano.


title: Joe Masseria

text: Giuseppe Masseria was born on January 17, 1886 in Menfi, Province of Agrigento, Sicily, in a family of tailors. When he was young, he moved to the town of Marsala, in the Province of Trapani. Masseria arrived in the United States in 1902. He then became part of the Morello crime family based in Harlem and parts of Little Italy in southern Manhattan. Masseria was a contemporary of other captains of that mafia family such as Gaetano Reina. In 1909, Masseria was convicted of burglary and received a suspended sentence. On May 23, 1913, Masseria was sentenced to four to six years in prison for third-degree burglary.


title: Joe Masseria

text: As the 1910s ended, Masseria and boss Salvatore D'Aquila vied for power in New York. By the early 1920s, they were at war with each other. In 1920, Masseria had recruited Lucky Luciano as one of his gunmen. D'Aquila also had a gunman working for him, Umberto Valenti, and ordered him to kill Masseria. On May 7, 1922, the boss of the Morello/Terranova crime family, Vincenzo Terranova, was killed in a drive-by shooting near his E. 116th Street home. Valenti was believed to have been personally responsible. Hours later, Terranova's underboss Silva Tagliagamba was fatally wounded in Lower Manhattan by Valenti and gunmen working for him. The next day, Valenti and some of his men attacked the new boss of the rival Terranova family, Masseria. Valenti found Masseria and his bodyguards on Grand Street "within a block of Police Headquarters". Masseria got away, but the gunmen had shot four men and two women; Masseria tossed his pistol away and was arrested while fleeing the scene.


title: Joe Masseria

text: On August 9, 1922, Masseria walked out of his apartment at 80 2nd Avenue, and was rushed by two armed men who opened fire on him. Masseria ducked into a store at 82 2nd Avenue with the gunmen in pursuit. They shot out the front window and shot up the inside of the store. The gunmen fled across 2nd Avenue to a getaway car idling just around the corner on E. 5th Street. The car was a Hudson Cruiser. The gunmen jumped on the running boards as the car sped west on E. 5th Street towards the Bowery, guns blazing. The gunmen then plowed through a crowd and shot randomly at the blockade, wounding six men. Masseria survived the incident and was found by police in his upstairs bedroom shell-shocked. He was sitting on his bed dazed, with two bullet holes through his straw hat, which he was still wearing. The incident gained Masseria new respect among gangsters as "the man who can dodge bullets" and his reputation began to rise as D'Aquila's began to wane.


title: Joe Masseria

text: Forty-eight hours later, on August 11, Valenti attended a meeting in a cafe at the corner of Second Avenue and E. 12th Street, where he was murdered as he tried to flee.


title: Joe Masseria

text: Masseria became head of the Morello family and was known as "Joe the Boss", with Giuseppe Morello as his "consigliere".


title: Joe Masseria

text: Salvatore D'Aquila was killed on October 10, 1928. Masseria, the leader of a gang that emerged from the old Morello crime family, was selected to replace D'Aquila as the new "capo dei capi" that winter. After his elevation, Masseria began applying pressure to other mafia gangs for monetary tributes. Other mobsters accused him of orchestrating the 1930 murders of Gaspar Milazzo in Detroit and Gaetano Reina in the Bronx. Nicolo Schiro tried to replicate the strategy of neutrality he used to deal with D'Aquila with Masseria but he was vigorously opposed by Salvatore Maranzano and Buffalo boss Stefano Magaddino. Masseria claimed Schiro had committed a transgression and demanded Schiro pay him $10,000 and step down as leader of his mafia crime family. Schiro complied. Soon after, Vito Bonventre was murdered at his home on July 15, 1930. This led to Maranzano being elevated to boss of the gang and a conflict with Masseria and his allies referred to as the Castellammarese War.


title: Joe Masseria

text: During the Castellammarese War, between 1930 and 1931, Masseria and Morello fought against a rival group, based in Brooklyn, led by Salvatore Maranzano and Joseph Bonanno. Morello, an old hand in the killing game, became Masseria's "war chief" and strategic adviser.


title: Joe Masseria

text: One of the first victims of the war, Morello was killed along with associate Joseph Perriano on August 15, 1930, while collecting cash receipts in his East Harlem office. Joseph Valachi, the first made man in the American Mafia to turn state's evidence, identified Morello's killer as a Castellammarese gunman he knew as "Buster from Chicago".


title: Joe Masseria

text: In a secret deal with Maranzano, Lucky Luciano agreed to engineer the death of his boss, Masseria, in return for receiving Masseria's rackets and becoming Maranzano's second-in-command. Joe Adonis had joined the Masseria faction and when Masseria heard about Luciano's betrayal, he approached Adonis about killing Luciano. However, Adonis instead warned Luciano about the murder plot. On April 15, 1931, Luciano lured Masseria to a meeting where he was murdered at a restaurant called Nuova Villa Tammaro on Coney Island. While they played cards, Luciano allegedly excused himself to the bathroom, with the gunmen reportedly being Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel; Ciro "The Artichoke King" Terranova drove the getaway car, but legend has it that he was too shaken up to drive away and had to be shoved out of the driver's seat by Siegel.


title: Joe Masseria

text: Luciano was brought in for questioning by the police. At the time, police suspected a gangster named John "Silk Stockings" Giustra as being one of the gunmen in Masseria's murder. This was based on the report of a confidential informant and that one of the coats found at the murder scene was identified as belonging to Giustra. The case was dropped after Giustra was murdered on July 9, 1931.


title: Joe Masseria

text: According to "The New York Times", "[A]fter that, the police have been unable to learn definitely [what happened]". Reputedly Masseria was "seated at a table playing cards with two or three unknown men" when he was fired upon from behind. He died from gunshot wounds to his head, back, and chest. Masseria's autopsy report shows that he died on an empty stomach. No witnesses came forward, though "two or three" men were observed leaving the restaurant and getting into a stolen car. No one was convicted in Masseria's murder as there were no witnesses and Luciano had an alibi.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Stephen Jay Gould (; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, infrequently punctuated by swift periods of branching speciation. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera "Poecilozonites" and "Cerion". He also made important contributions to evolutionary developmental biology, receiving broad professional recognition for his book "Ontogeny and Phylogeny". In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or "non-overlapping magisteria") whose authorities do not overlap.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould was known by the general public mainly for his 300 popular essays in "Natural History" magazine, and his numerous books written for both the specialist and non-specialist.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Stephen Jay Gould was born in Queens, New York, on September 10, 1941. His father Leonard was a court stenographer and a World War II veteran in the United States Navy. His mother Eleanor was an artist, whose parents were Jewish immigrants living and working in the city's Garment District. Gould and his younger brother Peter were raised in Bayside, a middle-class neighborhood in the northeastern section of Queens. He attended elementary school and graduated from Jamaica High School.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: When Gould was five years old his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered "Tyrannosaurus rex". "I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck," Gould once recalled. It was in that moment that he decided to become a paleontologist.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion and preferred to be called an agnostic. When asked directly if he was an agnostic in "Skeptic" magazine, he responded:


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Though he "had been brought up by a Marxist father" he stated that his father's politics were "very different" from his own. In describing his own political views, he has said they "tend to the left of center." According to Gould the most influential political books he read were C. Wright Mills' "The Power Elite" and the political writings of Noam Chomsky.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: While attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the early 1960s, Gould was active in the civil rights movement and often campaigned for social justice. When he attended the University of Leeds as a visiting undergraduate, he organized weekly demonstrations outside a Bradford dance hall which refused to admit black people. Gould continued these demonstrations until the policy was revoked. Throughout his career and writings, he spoke out against cultural oppression in all its forms, especially what he saw as the pseudoscience used in the service of racism and sexism.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Interspersed throughout his scientific essays for "Natural History" magazine, Gould frequently referred to his non-scientific interests and pastimes. As a boy he collected baseball cards and remained an avid New York Yankees fan throughout his life. As an adult he was fond of science fiction movies, but often lamented their poor storytelling and presentation of science. His other interests included singing baritone in the Boston Cecilia, and he was a great aficionado of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He collected rare antiquarian books, possessed an enthusiasm for architecture, and delighted in city walks. He often traveled to Europe, and spoke French, German, Russian, and Italian. He sometimes alluded ruefully to his tendency to put on weight.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould married artist Deborah Lee on October 3, 1965. Gould met Lee while they were students together at Antioch College. They had two sons, Jesse and Ethan, and were married for 30 years. His second marriage in 1995 was to artist and sculptor Rhonda Roland Shearer.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In July 1982 Gould was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a deadly form of cancer affecting the abdominal lining (the peritoneum). This cancer is frequently found in people who have ingested or inhaled asbestos fibers, a mineral which was used in the construction of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. After a difficult two-year recovery, Gould published a column for "Discover" magazine in 1985 titled "The Median Isn't the Message", which discusses his reaction to reading that "mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery." In his essay, he describes the actual significance behind this fact, and his relief upon recognizing that statistical averages are useful abstractions, and by themselves do not encompass "our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould was also an advocate of medical cannabis. When undergoing his cancer treatments he smoked marijuana to help alleviate the long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea. According to Gould, the drug had a "most important effect" on his eventual recovery. He later complained that he could not understand how "any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes." On August 5, 1998, Gould's testimony assisted in the successful lawsuit of HIV activist Jim Wakeford, who sued the Government of Canada for the right to cultivate, possess, and use marijuana for medical purposes.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In February 2002, a lesion was found on Gould's chest radiograph, and oncologists diagnosed him with stage IV cancer. Gould died 10 weeks later on May 20, 2002, from a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung, an aggressive form of cancer which had already spread to his brain, liver, and spleen. This cancer was unrelated to his previous bout of abdominal cancer in 1982. He died in his home "in a bed set up in the library of his SoHo loft, surrounded by his wife Rhonda, his mother Eleanor, and the many books he loved."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould began his higher education at Antioch College, graduating with a double major in geology and philosophy in 1963. During this time, he also studied at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. After completing graduate work at Columbia University in 1967 under the guidance of Norman Newell, he was immediately hired by Harvard University where he worked until the end of his life (1967–2002). In 1973, Harvard promoted him to professor of geology and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the institution's Museum of Comparative Zoology.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In 1982, Harvard awarded him the title of Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. That same year, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 1983, he was awarded a fellowship at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he later served as president (1999–2001). The AAAS news release cited his "numerous contributions to both scientific progress and the public understanding of science." He also served as president of the Paleontological Society (1985–1986) and of the Society for the Study of Evolution (1990–1991).


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In 1989, Gould was elected into the body of the National Academy of Sciences. Through 1996–2002 Gould was Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University. In 2001, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year for his lifetime of work. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Darwin–Wallace Medal, along with 12 other recipients. (Until 2008, this medal had been awarded every 50 years by the Linnean Society of London.)


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Early in his career, Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which describes the rate of speciation in the fossil record as occurring relatively rapidly, which then alternates to a longer period of evolutionary stability. It was Gould who coined the term "punctuated equilibria" though the theory was originally presented by Eldredge in his doctoral dissertation on Devonian trilobites and his article published the previous year on allopatric speciation.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: According to Gould, punctuated equilibrium revised a key pillar "in the central logic of Darwinian theory." Some evolutionary biologists have argued that while punctuated equilibrium was "of great interest to biology generally," it merely modified neo-Darwinism in a manner that was fully compatible with what had been known before.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Other biologists emphasize the theoretical novelty of punctuated equilibrium, and argued that evolutionary stasis had been "unexpected by most evolutionary biologists" and "had a major impact on paleontology and evolutionary biology."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Comparisons were made to George Gaylord Simpson's work in "Tempo and Mode in Evolution" (1941), in which he also illustrated relatively sudden changes along evolutionary lines. Simpson describes the paleontological record as being characterized by predominantly gradual change (which he termed horotely), although he also documented examples of slow (bradytely), and rapid (tachytely) rates of evolution. Punctuated equilibrium and phyletic gradualism are not mutually exclusive (as Simpson's work demonstrates), and examples of each have been documented in different lineages. The debate between these two models is often misunderstood by non-scientists, and according to Richard Dawkins has been oversold by the media.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould made significant contributions to evolutionary developmental biology, especially in his work "Ontogeny and Phylogeny". In this book he emphasized the process of heterochrony, which encompasses two distinct processes: neoteny and terminal additions. Neoteny is the process where ontogeny is slowed down and the organism does not reach the end of its development. Terminal addition is the process by which an organism adds to its development by speeding and shortening earlier stages in the developmental process. Gould's influence in the field of evolutionary developmental biology continues to be seen today in areas such as the evolution of feathers.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould was a champion of biological constraints, internal limitations upon developmental pathways, as well as other non-selectionist forces in evolution. Rather than direct adaptations, he considered many higher functions of the human brain to be the unintended side consequence of natural selection. To describe such co-opted features, he coined the term exaptation with paleontologist Elisabeth Vrba. Gould believed this feature of human mentality undermines an essential premise of human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In 1975, Gould's Harvard colleague E. O. Wilson introduced his analysis of animal behavior (including human behavior) based on a sociobiological framework that suggested that many social behaviors have a strong evolutionary basis. In response, Gould, Richard Lewontin, and others from the Boston area wrote the subsequently well-referenced letter to "The New York Review of Books" entitled, "Against 'Sociobiology'". This open letter criticized Wilson's notion of a "deterministic view of human society and human action."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: But Gould did not rule out sociobiological explanations for many aspects of animal behavior, and later wrote: "Sociobiologists have broadened their range of selective stories by invoking concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection to solve (successfully I think) the vexatious problem of altruism—previously the greatest stumbling block to a Darwinian theory of social behavior... Here sociobiology has had and will continue to have success. And here I wish it well. For it represents an extension of basic Darwinism to a realm where it should apply."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: With Richard Lewontin, Gould wrote an influential 1979 paper entitled, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm",


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: which introduced the architectural term "spandrel" into evolutionary biology. In architecture, a spandrel is a triangular space which exists over the haunches of an arch. Spandrels—more often called pendentives in this context—are found particularly in classical architecture, especially Byzantine and Renaissance churches.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: When visiting Venice in 1978, Gould noted that the spandrels of the San Marco cathedral, while quite beautiful, were not spaces planned by the architect. Rather the spaces arise as "necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches." Gould and Lewontin thus defined "spandrels" in the evolutionary biology context to mean any biological feature of an organism that arises as a necessary side consequence of other features, which is not directly selected for by natural selection. Proposed examples include the "masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In Voltaire's "Candide", Dr. Pangloss is portrayed as a clueless scholar who, despite the evidence, insists that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". Gould and Lewontin asserted that it is Panglossian for evolutionary biologists to view all traits as atomized things that had been naturally selected for, and criticised biologists for not granting theoretical space to other causes, such as phyletic and developmental constraints. The relative frequency of spandrels, so defined, versus adaptive features in nature, remains a controversial topic in evolutionary biology.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: An illustrative example of Gould's approach can be found in Elisabeth Lloyd's case study suggesting that the female orgasm is a by-product of shared developmental pathways. Gould also wrote on this topic in his essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples," prompted by Lloyd's earlier work.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould was criticized by philosopher Daniel Dennett for using the term spandrel instead of pendentive, a spandrel that curves across a right angle to support a dome. Robert Mark, a professor of civil engineering at Princeton, offered his expertise in the pages of "American Scientist", noting that these definitions are often misunderstood in architectural theory. Mark concluded, "Gould and Lewontin's misapplication of the term spandrel for pendentive perhaps implies a wider latitude of design choice than they intended for their analogy. But Dennett's critique of the architectural basis of the analogy goes even further astray because he slights the technical rationale of the architectural elements in question."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould favored the argument that evolution has no inherent drive towards long-term "progress". Uncritical commentaries often portray evolution as a ladder of progress, leading towards bigger, faster, and smarter organisms, the assumption being that evolution is somehow driving organisms to get more complex and ultimately more like humankind. Gould argued that evolution's drive was not towards complexity, but towards diversification. Because life is constrained to begin with a simple starting point (like bacteria), any diversity resulting from this start, by random walk, will have a skewed distribution and therefore be perceived to move in the direction of higher complexity. But life, Gould argued, can also easily adapt towards simplification, as is often the case with parasites.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: In a review of "", Richard Dawkins approved of Gould's general argument, but suggested that he saw evidence of a "tendency for lineages to improve cumulatively their adaptive fit to their particular way of life, by increasing the numbers of features which combine together in adaptive complexes. ... By this definition, adaptive evolution is not just incidentally progressive, it is deeply, dyed-in-the-wool, indispensably progressive."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould's arguments towards progress in evolutionary biology did not extend towards a notion of progress in general or notions of cultural evolution. In "", Gould compares two notions of progress against one another. While the first concept of progress, evolutionary progress, is argued to be invalid for a number of biological considerations, Gould permits that evolution may operate in human cultural evolution through a Lamarckian mechanism. Gould goes on to argue that the disappearance of the 0.400 batting average in baseball is paradoxically due to the inclusion of better players in the league, rather than players becoming worse over time. In his view such a process is likely reflective in a number of cultural phenomena including sports, the visual arts, and music where, unlike in biological systems, the realm of aesthetic possibilities is constrained by a "right wall" of human limits and aesthetic preferences. Gould later goes on to state that his arguments for biological evolution should not be applied to cultural change lest they be employed by, "so-called ‘political correctness’ as a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgements, or analyses."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould never embraced cladistics as a method of investigating evolutionary lineages and process, possibly because he was concerned that such investigations would lead to neglect of the details in historical biology, which he considered all-important. In the early 1990s this led him into a debate with Derek Briggs, who had begun to apply quantitative cladistic techniques to the Burgess Shale fossils, about the methods to be used in interpreting these fossils. Around this time cladistics rapidly became the dominant method of classification in evolutionary biology. Inexpensive but increasingly powerful personal computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics. Around the same time the development of effective polymerase chain reaction techniques made it possible to apply cladistic methods of analysis to biochemical and genetic features as well.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Most of Gould's empirical research pertained to land snails. He focused his early work on the Bermudian genus "Poecilozonites", while his later work concentrated on the West Indian genus "Cerion". According to Gould ""Cerion" is the land snail of maximal diversity in form throughout the entire world. There are 600 described species of this single genus. In fact, they're not really species, they all interbreed, but the names exist to express a real phenomenon which is this incredible morphological diversity. Some are shaped like golf balls, some are shaped like pencils. ... Now my main subject is the evolution of form, and the problem of how it is that you can get this diversity amid so little genetic difference, so far as we can tell, is a very interesting one. And if we could solve this we'd learn something general about the evolution of form."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Given "Cerion" extensive geographic diversity, Gould later lamented that if Christopher Columbus had only catalogued a single "Cerion" it would have ended the scholarly debate about which island Columbus had first set foot on in America.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould is one of the most frequently cited scientists in the field of evolutionary theory. His 1979 "spandrels" paper has been cited more than 5,000 times. In "Paleobiology"—the flagship journal of his own speciality—only Charles Darwin and George Gaylord Simpson have been cited more often. Gould was also a considerably respected historian of science. Historian Ronald Numbers has been quoted as saying: "I can't say much about Gould's strengths as a scientist, but for a long time I've regarded him as the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn)."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Shortly before his death, Gould published "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" (2002), a long treatise recapitulating his version of modern evolutionary theory. In an interview for the Dutch TV series "Of Beauty and Consolation" Gould remarked, "In a couple of years I will be able to gather in one volume my view of how evolution works. It is to me a great consolation because it represents the putting together of a lifetime of thinking into one source. That book will never be particularly widely read. It's going to be far too long, and it's only for a few thousand professionals—very different from my popular science writings—but it is of greater consolation to me because it is a chance to put into one place a whole way of thinking about evolution that I've struggled with all my life."


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould became widely known through his popular essays on evolution in the "Natural History" magazine. His essays were published in a series entitled "This View of Life" (a phrase from the concluding paragraph of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species") from January 1974 to January 2001, amounting to a continuous publication of 300 essays. Many of his essays were reprinted in collected volumes that became bestselling books such as "Ever Since Darwin" and "The Panda's Thumb", "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes", and "The Flamingo's Smile".


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: A passionate advocate of evolutionary theory, Gould wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary biology to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of pre-evolutionary and evolutionary thought. He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and sabermetrician (analyst of baseball statistics), and made frequent reference to the sport in his essays. Many of his baseball essays were anthologized in his posthumously published book "Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville" (2003).


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Although a self-described Darwinist, Gould's emphasis was less gradualist and reductionist than most neo-Darwinists. He fiercely opposed many aspects of sociobiology and its intellectual descendant evolutionary psychology. He devoted considerable time to fighting against creationism, creation science, and intelligent design. Most notably, Gould provided expert testimony against the equal-time creationism law in "McLean v. Arkansas". Gould later developed the term "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) to describe how, in his view, science and religion should not comment on each other's realm. Gould went on to develop this idea in some detail, particularly in the books "Rocks of Ages" (1999) and "The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox" (2003). In a 1982 essay for "Natural History" Gould wrote:


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: An "anti-evolution petition" drafted by the Discovery Institute inspired the National Center for Science Education to create a pro-evolution counterpart called "Project Steve," which is named in Gould's honor. In 2011 the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) selected Gould for inclusion in CSI's "Pantheon of Skeptics" created to remember the legacy of deceased CSI fellows and their contributions to the cause of scientific skepticism.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould also became a noted public face of science, often appearing on television. In 1984 Gould received his own "NOVA" special on PBS. Other appearances included interviews on CNN's "Crossfire" and "Talkback Live", NBC's "The Today Show", and regular appearances on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show. Gould was also a guest in all seven episodes of the Dutch talk series "A Glorious Accident", in which he appeared with his close friend Oliver Sacks.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Gould was featured prominently as a guest in Ken Burns's PBS documentary "Baseball", as well as PBS's "Evolution" series. Gould was also on the Board of Advisers to the influential Children's Television Workshop television show "3-2-1 Contact", where he made frequent guest appearances.


title: Stephen Jay Gould

text: Since 2013, Gould has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.