A view on evolution (from the 1950s)

This is from "The Tree of Culture", by Ralph Linton, published in 1955. I wonder what Dr. Linton would think of the Creationist (or anti-evolutionist) movement of today.

"The primary purpose of this book is to set down what we know about the origins and growth of what the anthropologist calls culture: the mass of behavior that human beings in any society learn from their elders and pass on to the younger generation. However, before going into this, it is worthwile to say a little about the origins and qualities of the animal responsible for this curious behavior. This is the more necessary because there is, as always, a lag between what the scientist knows and what the non-scientist believes. The battle between the anthropologists and the anti-evolutionists, which in any case was mainly shadow-boxing on the part of the anti-evolutionists, has long since been fought and won. Outside of a few geographical or intellectual back districts, no one questions today that we are descended from some sort of animal. The main problems are what sort of animal, and what line human evolution has followed. We can dispose of one popular misunderstanding immediately. It is certain that man is not descended from any anthropoid ape now extant. These apes are not our ancestors but our cousins whose line of descent branched off from our own at least a million years ago."

Writing historical fiction

Claudius the God, Robert Graves
From the author's note prefacing the book:

Some reviewers of I, Claudius, the prefatory volume to Claudius the God, suggested that in writing it I had merely consulted Tacitus's Annals and Suetonius's Twelve Caesars, run them together, and expanded the result with my own "vigorous fancy." This was not so; nor is it the case here. Among the Classical writers who have been borrowed from in the composition of Claudius the God are Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius, Pliny, Varro, Valerius Maximus, Orosius, Frontinus, Strabo, Caesar, Columella, Plutarch, Josephus, Diodorus Siculus, Photius, Xiphilinus, Zonaras, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal, Philo, Celsus, the authors of the Acts of the Apostles and of the pseudo-gospels of Nicodemus and St. James, and Claudius himself in his surviving letters and speeches. Few incidents here given are wholly unsupported by historical authority of some sort or other and I hope none are historically incredible. No character is invented. The most difficult part to write, because of the meagreness of contemporary references to it, has been Claudius's defeat of Caractacus. For a plausible view of British Druidism, too, I have had to help out the few Classical notices of it with borrowings from archaeological works, from ancient Celtic literature and from accounts of modern megalithic culture in the New Hebrides, where the dolmen and menhir are still ceremonially used. I have been particularly careful in my account of early Christianity to invent no new libels; but some old ones are quoted, for Claudius himself was not well-disposed to the Church and derived most of his information about near-Eastern religious matters from his old shool-friend Herod Agrippa, the Jewish king who executed St. James and imprisoned St. Peter.

Peace negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict

The Case for Israel; Alan Dershowitz
Chapter 16: "Has Israel Made Serious Efforts at Peace?"

p. 108:
"When the Oslo peace process began in the early 1990s, Israel was willing to accept the Palestinian Authority as an equal negotiating partner so long as the Palestinian Authority was willing to accept Israel's right to exist. Never before in history had the winning side of defensive wars been willing to negotiate with the losing side that had started the wars being treated as equals. To regard those who have initiated aggressive wars and lost as equal bargaining partners is to encourage the waging of war as an adjunct to negotiation. There must be a price paid for starting and losing wars. That price includes a diminished status in the postwar peace negotiations."

p. 115:
"It may seem ironic that so soon after Israel offered the Palestinians nearly everything they and the international community wanted -a Palestinian state with Arab Jerusalem as its capital, return of the entire Gaza Strip and almost the entire West Bank, a fair and practical resolution of the refugee issue, and an end to Jewish settlements- it is now a pariah of the international community, European public opinion, and large segments of the American academic and religious left. Israel has become the object of divestiture and boycott campaigns and other efforts at demonization, while the Palestinians -who rejected the peace offer and responded with the systematic and deliberate murder of Israeli civilians- have become the darlings of the same groups."

Civilian deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict

The Case for Israel; Alan Dershowitz

Under the chapter "Was the Israeli War of Independence Expansionist Aggression?", on pages 75-76, it says the following:

"As we shall see in chapters 13 and 20, the regular Israeli army has not responded by targeting Arab population centers, such as Amman, Damascus, and Cairo, even though these cities have been well within the range of Israeli aircraft. The Israeli army, like every other army in the world, has killed civilians while attacking military targets, especially since the Arab armies and terrorist groups often hide and protect their military targets by deliberately surrounding them with civilian shields. Israel, on the other hand, has isolated its military bases as far as possible from its civilian population centers. There is, of course, an enormous difference in morality as well as law in expressly targeting civilians, as the Arabs have long done, and collaterally hitting civilians who are close to appropriate military targets that pose a continuing danger. The former is a crime against humanity absolutely prohibited by international law. The latter is permissible under the laws of war so long as the response is proportional and reasonable and efforts are made to minimize civilian casualties."