Late one night at the insane asylum, one inmate shouted, "I am Napoleon!"
Another patient asked, "How do you know?"
The first inmate said, "Because God told me!"
Just then, a voice from another room shouted, "I did NOT!"
Alpheus HyattBorn 5 Apr 1838; died 15 Jan 1902 at age 63.U.S. zoologist and paleontologist who studied invertebrate fossil records, the evolution of the cephalopods (a class of mollusks including squids and octopuses) and the development of primitive organisms. Along with E. Cope, he was the most prominent American neo-Lamarckian. Based on the analogy of ontogeny with phylogeny, Hyatt claimed that lineages, like individuals, had cycles of youth, old age, and death (extinction). Decline was programmed in. As maturity leads to old age, the best individuals die, leaving the worst to see the end. This idea became the bulwark of orthogenetic theories in the U.S. Hyatt was the founder and first editor of the American Naturalist, and first president of Woods Hole laboratory. |
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