I just finished watching a video on how to dissect a human corpse in order to learn about skin, cutaneous nerves and lymph nodes (warning to the squeamish: There's no sugar-coating here--it's a highly graphic lesson on how to do a human dissection). I thought to myself: "This is incredible. …
And how! Observe: The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn't even subtle. Mmm, that's good…
...especially when described in Ebonmuse's inimitable, emotive style in "The Age Of Wonder": Consider what we witness when we peer into the cosmos with our telescopic eyes. We see light born billions of years ago in the crucible of dying stars, shining out across the cosmos and becoming ever more…
I've previously posted on the work of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, who have argued that human thought is often metaphorical. Johnson and Lakoff have used numerous examples of our use of language to demonstrate that human cognition is often a metaphorical extension of sensorimotor experience. I've been collecting experimental…
The language of science is always so amazingly precise . . . except when it isn't. Consider, for example, the word "life." Scientists have long struggled to determine exactly what qualifies as "life." For instance, are viruses “alive?” In the October 23, 2008 edition of Nature (available only to subscribers online), an article titled "Disputed Definitions" considers other often-used disputed terms. The article is divided into sections written by specialists from the relevant disciplines. The subtitle of the article is "Nature goes in search of the terms that get scientists most worked up." Consider how often you encounter the following disputed terms. Consider "paradigm shift," made popular by Thomas Kuhn in his often-cited 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued against the then-popular view that science marched incrementally toward the truth. Sometimes, "normal science" doesn't explain all of the phenomenon, straining a prevailing scientific theory. If the strain of accommodating evidence is great enough "eventually some new science comes along and overturns the previous consensus. Voila, a ‘paradigm shift.’" The often-used term "paradigm shift" is used in at least two ways, however. In its broad sense it encompasses the "entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community." In the narrow sense, it refers to "concrete puzzle-solutions." Another often-debated (and currently fashionable) term is "epigenetic."