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There’s no doubt that seeing one’s future child on an ultrasound monitor is a powerful experience, the first visual evidence of the fetus in a culture in which seeing is believing. The encounter can be so compelling, in fact, that some medical providers are using it not just as a diagnostic tool, but as a treatment in…
Science is different from many another human enterprise - not, of course, in its practitioners' being influenced by the culture they grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong (which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive…
If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: we are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically and not to accept uncritically whatever we're told; to surmount as best we can…
They speak about the mission of the Enterprise being "To boldly go--" a split infinitive I heard every single time--"To boldly go where no man has ever gone before" they mean it primarily, I suppose, in... territorially. They're visiting stars that no man has till then ever visited. Their going through vastnesses no…
As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Starfleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world…
I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling…
From the early days of Darwinism analogies have been drawn between biological evolution and the evolution of culture. Darwin's contemporary Herbert Spencer studied the evolution of civilizations, which he viewed as progressing towards an ideal something like that of Victorian English society. Lewis Morgan's…
The educator must be an anthropologist. The educator as anthropologist must work to understand which cultural materials are relevant to intellectual development. Then, he or she needs to understand which trends are taking place in the culture. Meaningful intervention must take the form of working with these trends. In…
This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world. But it had a disease in it. It was possible to pass on mistaken ideas. It was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, which…
Communities often have a culture, but there is an important distinction between culture and community. Culture is a set of rules, perceptions, language, history, and the like. It is embodied in books and songs, people's minds, and Websites. Culture can be learned, even though there are some communities that believe…
So everyone agrees these days: Hooray for pirates! Art and culture (or, more discouragingly, "content") should be free. Techno-utopians of the left and right envision a future in which everything ever made is accessible, at no cost, with a click of a button. Those who think "free" as in speech envision a new digital…