 ^
Births
which occurred on a 05 July:
2000
Ginaya Farran, in the defendants' cage in the criminal court of
judge Abdel-Munem Othman in Damietta, Egypt. Her mother, Amal Ahmed Farran,
35, went into labor right after being sentenced to 3 years at hard labor
for drug trafficking. Ginaya means Felony in Arabic. Under Egyptian law,
mothers can keep their children in jail with them until they reach the age
of four.
1996 Dolly Finn Dorset, ewe, by caesarean
section from a surrogate Scottish Blackface mother [at right, with Dolly
at left >], at the Roslin
Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland. Dolly is the first animal cloned from
an adult cell (an udder cell of a 6-year-old ewe), after 277 failed attempts
to clone a sheep. The birth would be announced on 23 February 1997. Dolly
would give birth (the usual way) to lamb Bonnie in 13 April 1998 and to
two males and one female in 24 March 1999. The father of all 4 is David
Welsh Mountain ram. Prematurely aged, suffering from arthritis since January
2002, and now ill with a virus-induced lung cancer, Dolly would be put to
death at half the average natural death age of sheep, on 14 February 2003.
1983 Baby girl born in Roanoke, Virginia, to a mother
brain dead for 84 days.
1946
The “bikini” swimsuit.
French designer Louis
Reard unveils a daring two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor,l in Paris.
Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new fashion, which Reard
dubbed "bikini," inspired by a news-making US atomic test that took place
off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week. European women
first began wearing two-piece bathing suits that consisted of a halter top
and shorts in the 1930s, but only a sliver of the midriff was revealed and
the navel was vigilantly covered. In the United States, the modest two-piece
made its appearance during World War II, when wartime rationing of fabric
saw the removal of the skirt panel and other superfluous material. Meanwhile,
in Europe, fortified coastlines and Allied invasions curtailed beach life
during the war, and swimsuit development, like everything else non-military,
came to a standstill. In 1946, Western Europeans joyously greeted the first
war-free summer in years, and French designers came up with fashions to
match the liberated mood of the people. Two French designers, Jacques Heim
and Louis Reard, developed competing prototypes of the bikini. Heim called
his the "atom" and advertised it as "the world's smallest bathing suit."
Reard's swimsuit, which was basically a bra top and two inverted triangles
of cloth connected by string, was in fact significantly smaller. Made out
of a scant 75 cm of fabric, Reard promoted his creation as "smaller than
the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard called his creation the bikini,
named after the Bikini Atoll.
In planning
the debut of his new swimsuit, Reard had trouble finding a professional
model who would deign to wear the scandalously skimpy two-piece. So he turned
to Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris, who had
no qualms about appearing nearly nude in public. As an allusion to the headlines
that he knew his swimsuit would generate, he printed newspaper type across
the suit that Bernardini modeled on 05 July at the Piscine Molitor. The
bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50'000
fan letters. Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation
along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures prohibiting
bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the changing times when
the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European beaches in the 1950s. Reard's
business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive
by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn't a genuine bikini "unless it could
be pulled through a wedding ring." In prudish America, the bikini was successfully
resisted until the early 1960s, when a new emphasis on youthful liberation
brought the swimsuit en masse to US beaches. It was immortalized by the
pop singer Brian Hyland, who sang "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot
Bikini" in 1960, by the teenage "beach blanket" movies of Annette Funicello
and Frankie Avalon, and by the California surfing culture celebrated by
rock groups like the Beach Boys. Since then, the popularity of the bikini
has hardly diminished; though on beaches in Brazil and the Mediterranean
today, many women favor the "monokini," a swimsuit style that consists solely
of a bikini bottom.
1911 Luis Díez del Corral, profesor y académico español.
^
1904 Ernst Mayr, German-born
US biologist who died on 03 February 2005, a professor emeritus of
zoology at Harvard. He was known for his work in avian taxonomy, population
genetics, and he was the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th
century.
Mayr earned a medical
degree from the University of Greifswald in 1925. Descended from generations
of doctors, he broke off his medical career and turned his attention
to zoology, earning a doctorate from the University of Berlin just
16 months later.
In 1927, at a
zoological convention in Budapest, Mayr met Lord Rothschild, who had
been looking for someone to travel to New Guinea to collect birds
of paradise. In 1928, Mayr, then a member of the university staff,
led the first of three expeditions to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands,
where he was profoundly impressed with the effects of geographic distribution
among various animal species. His early studies of the ability of
one species to separate or subdivide into daughter species (speciation)
and of those populations that were established by a small number of
founders (founder populations) made him one of the leaders in the
development ofthe modern synthetic theory of evolution. This theory
encompasses the biological processes of gene mutation and recombination,
changes in the structure and function of chromosomes, reproductive
isolation, and natural selection.
Mayr continued his studies as the curator of birds at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York (1932–1953), where he
wrote more than 100 papers on avian taxonomy, including Birds
of the Southwest Pacific (1945). He proposed in 1940 a definition
of species that won wide acceptance in scientific circles and led
to the discovery of a number of previously unknown species. In 1953
he became Alexander Agassiz professor of zoology at Harvard University
and in 1961 became director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology,
retiring from that position in 1970, but never quitting his research.
His works include Methods and Principles of Systemic Zoology
(with E.G. Linsley and R.L. Usinger; 1953), Animal Species and
Evolution (1963), and The Growth of Biological Thought
(1982), What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy
of a Scientific Discipline (Aug 2004).
—
Mayr was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis,
an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born.
The synthesis, which was one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements
of the 20th century, reconciled Darwin's theories of evolution with
new findings in laboratory genetics and in fieldwork on animal populations
and diversity.
One of Mayr's most
significant contributions was his persuasive argument for the role
of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually
universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established
a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology.
In a career spanning nine decades,
Mayr exerted a broad and powerful influence over the field of evolutionary
biology. Prolific, opinionated, provocative and dynamic, Mayr had
been a major figure and intellectual leader since the 1940's. Setting
much of the conceptual agenda for the field, he put the focus just
where Charles Darwin first placed it, on the question of how new species
originate.
Though Mayr will be
best remembered as a synthesizer and promoter of evolutionary ideas,
he was also an accomplished ornithologist. In fact, it was with the
sighting of a pair of unusual birds that Mayr's long career in biology
began in 1923 at age 19. Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany. While
still a boy, he was instructed in natural history by his father, Otto,
a judge. He quickly became a skilled birdwatcher and naturalist. Intending
to become a medical doctor like others in his family, Mayr was about
to leave for medical school when he spotted a pair of red-crested
pochards, a species of duck that had not been seen in Europe for 77
years. Though he took detailed notes, he could not get anyone to believe
his sighting. Finally, he met Dr. Erwin Stresemann, then the leading
German ornithologist, who was at the Berlin Zoological Museum and
who recognized his talents and invited him to work at the museum during
school holidays.
After two years
of medical studies at the University of Greifswald (chosen because
it was in the most interesting German region for birdwatching), Mayr,
like Darwin before him, opted for natural history. He completed his
Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in just 16 months. Mayr went on
to fulfill what he called "the greatest ambition of my youth,"
heading off to the tropics. In the South Pacific, principally New
Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Mayr collected more than 3000 birds
from 1928 to 1930. (He had to live off the land, and every bird, after
being skinned for study, went into the pot. As a result, he is said
to have eaten more birds of paradise than any other modern biologist.).
The South Seas experience, he once said, "had an impact on my
thinking that cannot be exaggerated." For it was his detailed
observations of the differences among geographically isolated populations
that contributed to his conviction that geography played a crucial
role in the origin of species.
Though Darwin titled his book The Origin of Species, little
in the book, in fact, addresses the question of how new species arise.
Mayr determined that when populations of a single species are separated
from one another, they slowly accumulate differences until they can
no longer interbreed. Mayr called this allopatric speciation and detailed
his arguments in his seminal book Systematics and the Origin of
Species (1942). Today allopatric speciation is accepted as the
most common way in which new species arise. Organic diversity had
at last received a convincing explanation in this book, one of the
greatest achievements of evolutionary biology.
Similarly, the most commonly held view of what constitutes a species
remains the one that Mayr promoted, known as the biological species
concept. First explicitly defined by Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, it
states that populations that can successfully interbreed are the same
species and those that cannot are different species. While numerous
other species concepts have been proposed and debated, this one continues
to reign supreme.
Mayr's focus
on species, both their nature and their origins, appears to have derived
from his experiences in the South Pacific. When he went to New Guinea,
Mayr once explained, there was a popular school of thinking known
as the nominalist school of philosophy that held that species did
not, in reality, exist. They were merely arbitrary categories, little
more than names. “But I discovered that the very same aggregations
or groupings of individuals that the trained zoologist called separate
species were called species by the New Guinea natives,” Mayr
said. “I collected 137 species of birds. The natives had 136
names for these birds - they confused only two of them. The coincidence
of what Western scientists called species and what the natives called
species was so total that I realized the species was a very real thing
in nature.”
Mayr eventually
became a living symbol of the beginnings of the modern field of evolution,
one of the last survivors of the handful of biologists, including
Theodosius Dobzhansky [25 Jan 1900 – 18 Dec 1975] and George
Gaylord Simpson [16 Jun 1902 – 06 Oct 1984], known as the architects
of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
In the evolutionary synthesis, neo-Darwinism took its place as today's
dominant theory of evolution. Taking place between the 1920's and
50's, the synthesis is recognized as a period of conceptual unification,
a time of "mutual education," as Mayr once described it.
Laboratory geneticists, studying mutations and population genetics,
began merging their views of evolution with those of field scientists
like Mayr who studied the diversity and origins of different species.
New findings, in genetics as well as other fields, were reconciled
with Darwin's theories of evolution. Competing theories, including
Lamarckism (the idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited),
were tossed aside, producing a much more unified view of evolution
at work.
Over his remarkably productive
career, Mayr wrote or edited 20 books and wrote more than 600 journal
articles. After his official retirement in 1975, he published more
than 200 of the articles, more than many scientists do in their entire
careers. He received awards including the National Medal of Science,
the Balzan Prize and the International Prize. He once noted that Nobel
Prizes were not given in evolutionary biology, saying, "Darwin
wouldn't have won it either." Mayr was an ardent promoter of
the academic discipline of evolutionary biology, and perhaps its most
energetic organizer, playing a critical role in founding the Society
for the Study of Evolution in 1946, and serving as the first editor
of its journal, Evolution, still the leading journal in the
field.
Meanwhile, his birds were
never forgotten. As a collector, ornithologist and curator, first
at the University of Berlin, then the American Museum of Natural History
in the 1930's and 1940's, and finally at the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard, Mayr made his mark. By the time he turned 90,
in 1994, he had named more than 24 valid bird species, more than any
other living ornithologist had at the time. He had named more than
400 subspecies and several new genuses of birds as well.
Mayr also took a serious interest in organisms other than birds, publishing
work on species delineations in plants, hybrids formed by snail species,
courtship behavior in fruit flies and the evolution of human blood
groups.
Mayr may have taken the
greatest pride in his theory of what he called peripatric speciation
and genetic revolutions, an idea he called "perhaps the most
original theory I have ever proposed." It was also his least
successful.
According to this controversial
theory, new species can be produced when very small populations are
cut off from the rest of the species. Unlike the more general theory
of allopatric speciation, holding that isolated populations slowly
accumulate differences until they can no longer interbreed, peripatric
speciation posits that extremely small populations, isolated in unusual
habitats, undergo what Mayr termed a "genetic revolution."
Undergoing drastic changes in their genome, populations evolve quickly
to become new species.
Some scientists
have said that this theory is unlikely, unsupported and untestable.
Others have defended it as a proposal, saying that while the idea
itself may not stand the test of time, it remains significant as one
of the first explicit theoretical models of speciation and its genetic
consequences.
Mayr also sowed the
seeds for the flowering of modern macroevolutionary theory. While
microevolutionary theory seeks to explain how species adapt to particular
environments or how evolution among populations can give rise to new
species, macroevolution theory encompasses a much bigger picture,
examining how some species survive better than others and how likely
or unlikely they are to give rise to other species. It was Mayr's
concept of the species and its role in the evolutionary process that
laid the foundations for many of the theories being tested by macroevolutionists
today.
In addition to his several
lifetimes' worth of work in evolution, Mayr also fathered an entirely
new field of study, creating almost singlehandedly the field of history
and philosophy of biology as a distinct discipline, apart from the
history of physics and chemistry, Dr. Smocovitis of the University
of Florida said. As with modern evolutionary biology, Mayr nurtured
the new discipline as organizer, mover and shaker. His own contributions
include the defining book The Growth of Biological Thought
(1982), as well as books on the philosophy of biology, Darwin and
the evolutionary synthesis.
Mayr,
a strong believer in the Hegelian dialectic as a way of advancing
understanding, was known for his definitive proclamations, which often
inspired as many heated rebuttals as nods of vigorous agreement. With
so long to consider the great pageant of the history of life, he seemed
to have taken on every subject of interest in evolutionary biology,
and his views are an unavoidable point at which to begin nearly any
argument of substance. No one will agree with all his positions, analyses,
and opinions. But anyone who has failed to read Mayr can hardly claim
to be educated in evolutionary biology.
|
1902 Henry Cabot Lodge (R) politician (VP candidate 1960);
ambassador (UN, Viet Nam)
1900 Bernard Cardinal Alfrink
cardinal of Ultrecht Netherlands
1889 Jean Cocteau
France, writer/artist/film maker (Le Potamak) — Jean Cocteau,
escritor y cineasta francés.
1886 Willem Drees PM
of Netherland (1948-58)
1885 André Lhote, French
Cubist
painter and sculptor who died on 24 January 1962. — MORE
ON LHOTE AT ART “4” JULY with
links to images.
1883 John Maynard Keynes, economista
británico.
1871 Miguel Asín Palacios, arabista y
filólogo español.
1868 William Henry Singer Jr.,
US artist who died in 1943.
^
1865 The Christian Mission (future Salvation
Army)
In the
East End of London, England, revivalist preacher William Booth, with
the assistance of his wife, Catherine, established the Christian Mission,
later known as the Salvation Army. Determined to wage war against
the twin evils of poverty and religious indifference with the efficiency
of a military organization, Booth modeled his Protestant sect after
the British army, labeling uniformed ministers as "officers" and new
members as "recruits."
A Methodist
minister, Booth preached the religious doctrines subscribed to by
mainstream Protestant evangelical denominations at the time. However,
the Christian Mission was unique in its commitment to establishing
a presence in the most forsaken neighborhoods and in its provision
for the absolute equality of women within the sect. Soup kitchens
were the first in a long line of a variety of projects designed to
provide physical and spiritual assistance to the destitute.
In 1878, the organization was renamed
the Salvation Army, and two years later the first US branch opened
in Pennsylvania. During the Great Depression, the Salvation Army provided
food and lodging for those in need, and during both World Wars distinguished
itself by its work with the armed services.
Today, the Salvation Army, still based in London, has branches in
more than seventy-five countries. The Army operates hospitals, emergency
and disaster services, alcoholic and drug rehabilitation programs,
community centers, social work centers, second-hand stores, and recreation
facilities. Voluntary contributions and profits from the sale of its
publications fund the organization. |
1853 Cecil John Rhodes, in England, South African politician,
diamond merchant. Il fut surnommé Le Napoléon du Cap. Élu Premier Ministre
de la colonie anglaise du Cap, il prit activement par à la guerre contre
les Boers. Sa statue domine la ville de Cap Town.
1840 Miguel
Jadraque y Sánchez de Ocaña, Spanish painter.
1828
Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël, Dutch artist who died on 23
August 1903. — MORE
ON GABRIËL AT ART “4” AUGUST
with links to images.
1810 Phineas Taylor Barnum
Bethel Conn, circus promoter (Barnum and Bailey "The Greatest Show on Earth")
1801 David G. Farragut, in Knoxville Tenn, naval
hero (Civil War Union Navy Admiral: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.")
1950 Pvt. Kenneth Shadrick of Skin Fork WV, who
would become the first US serviceman to die in the Korean War.
1794 Sylvester Graham developed graham cracker
1781
Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore.
1761 Louis-Léopold
Boilly, French portrait and genre painter who died on 04 January
1845. — MORE
ON BOILLY AT ART “4” JULY
with links to images.
|
^
On
a 05 July:
2003
Paul Childs, 15, Black [photo >], shot by White
policeman James Turney in Denver. The boy, who required medication for seizures
and behavior problems, and had impaired vision, was standing in his home's
doorway holding a knife. Turney would not be prosecuted for this killing.
Nor was he prosecuted for killing in 2002 partially deaf Gregory Smith,
18, who had pulled out a pocket knife.
2000
Sagar and 9 other Royal Bengal tigers, of unknown causes, while
seven of the 45 surviving tigers are in critical condition at the overcrowded
and underfunded Nandankanan Zoo, in Bhubaneshwar, capital of Orissa state,
India. The zoo does not have a staff veterinarian. Two of the dead tigers
are of the rare white variety, of which no other zoo in the world has as
many as this one. (Actually Sagar was the first to die, 000704 evening local
time) [photo: one of the dead tigers being carried away for a post-mortem,
000705]
