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What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive. You can think of mental models as psychological lenses that color and shape what we see. Some of this is genetic or…
...a flow of information can fertilize moral growth. Scholars who have puzzled over the trajectory of material progress in different parts of the world, such as the economist Thomas Sowell in his Culture trilogy and the physiologist Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, have concluded that the key to material…
The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body; it is a recipe for baking a body. As the hox story illustrates, DNA promoters express themselves in the fourth dimension; their timing is all. A chimp has a different head from a human being not because it has a different blueprint for the head, but because it…
Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then…
A consciousness of the fallacy of our senses is one of the most important consequences of the study of nature. This study teaches us that no object is seen by us in its true place, owing to aberration; that the colours of substances are solely the effects of the action of matter upon light; and that light itself, as…
If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing. That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: One has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound…
We can even see the origin of new, ecologically diverse bacterial species, all within a single laboratory flask. Paul Rainey and his colleagues at Oxford University placed a strain of the bacteria Pseudomonas fluorescens in a small vessel containing nutrient broth, and simply watched it. (It’s surprising but true that…
When we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what…
The blood, the fountain whence the spirits flow, The generous stream that waters every part, And motion, vigour, and warm life conveys To every Particle that moves or lives; This vital fluid, thro' unnumber'd tubes Pour'd by the heart, and to the heart again Refunded; scourg'd forever round and round; Enrag'd with…
There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly…
The sheets of tissue that fold, invaginate and turn inside out in a developing embryo do indeed grow, and it is that very growth that provides part of the motive force which, in origami, is supplied by the human hand. If you wanted to make an origami model with a sheet of living tissue instead of dead paper, there is…
Hermann von Helmholtz, the great nineteenthcentury German scientist (you could call him a physicist, but his contributions to biology and psychology were greater), said, of the eye: 'If an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his…
Another familiar example is the sculpting of the wolf, Canis lupus, into the two hundred or so breeds of dog, Canis familiaris, that are recognized as separate by the UK Kennel Club, and the larger number of breeds that are genetically isolated from one another by the apartheid-like rules of pedigree breeding…
rhe systematic development of knowledge and technology that we all 'science' originated in the millennia of prehistory, and early vomen were among these first 'scientists'. They invented tools, accumulated knowledge about edible and medicinal plants, and 3robably discovered 'the chemistry of pot-making, the physics of…