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“Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not.” “We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born.” “Oh, I like choice, though,” he said. “I like choosing the jobs I take and the places I go and the food I eat and the companions I sit and…
Yes, and Trout harped on the human need for extended families, and I still do, because it is so obvious that we, because we are human, need them as much as we need proteins and carbohydrates and fats and vitamins and essential minerals.
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would meet other babies, cousins not much older than it…
After my children turned 3, I employed some fun activities to improve executive function, roughly based on the canonical work of Adele Diamond. I would tell them that today was “opposite day. When I held up a drawn picture of the night, an inky black background sprinkled with stars, they were supposed to say “day.”…
A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of two giant, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. It’s not a kitchen table—it’s Walter Mischel’s Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly. “You see these cookies?” Mischel says. “You can eat just one of them right now if you want…
An old movie called Quest for Fire opens with our ancestors seated by a fire, munching on a variety of foods. Large insects buzz about the flames. All of a sudden, one of our relatives shoots out his arm, clumsily grabbing an insect out of thin air. He stuffs it into his mouth, munches heartily, and continues staring…
Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden…
So again, if, before the discovery of the magnet, anyone had said that a certain instrument had been invented by means of which the quarters and points of the heavens could be taken and distinguished with exactness, men would have been carried by their imagination to a variety of conjectures concerning the more…
One reason why researchers have had such a hard time replicating the composition of breast milk is that it isn't a fixed commodity. No two women's milk is identical, nor is the composition of any one mother's milk constant at all times; it varies with the amount of time that has elapsed postpartum, gradually changing…
Caffeine crosses the placenta and may even concentrate in the fetal circulation. Concern about its effect on fetal development stems from animal studies, where it has been found to be teratogenic when fed to pregnant rats in high doses; a dose equivalent to 150 cups of strong coffee per day causes malformations in…
We mentioned that part of what makes learning language difficult is that languages carve up sounds and different Ianguages carve them up differently. A wide variety of different sounds, with very different spectrograms, will all seem like the same sound to us, and, in turn, that sound will seem sharply different from…
But we also have some more direct evidence for the idea that children learn like scientists. Alison and Virginia Slaughter, one of her students, looked at three-year-old children who didn't yet fully understand belief—children who still said they had always thought that there were pencils in the candy box. Then, over…
Alison has done other experiments that point in a similar direction. For example, three-year-olds seem to be unable to remember how they learned about something, even when the events took place only a few moments before. In one study the experimenter hid a cup under a cloth "tunnel," a wire arch covered with cloth…
Archaeologists have discovered that since the Pleistocene, humans lave always suckled infants for several years. Using biochemical analysis given human population when its children moved from breast milk to other foods. In one group of skeletons from South Dakota dated between 5500-2000 b.c., children were apparently…
Even when women do decide to breast-feed, they sometimes feel they are thwarted by their own bodies. "Insufficient milk" is cited as a major reason women in the West terminate breast-feeding after a few days or weeks. The syndrome is fascinating because it is a clear example of a disease being "invented," defined, and…
Our notions of mother's milk come from what we see, and for most of us the milk we see is cow's milk, a brilliant white liquid. But milk from other species looks quite different—kangaroo milk, for example, is pink. But whatever the hue, breast milk is species-specific; that is, the composition is finely tuned to the…
If you believe the cosmos is made up of omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg problem, doesn’t…
Equally vain is the suggestion that the spirit is immortal because it is shielded by life-preserving powers: or because it is unassailed by forces hostile to its survival; or because such forces, if they threaten, are somehow repelled before we are conscious of the threat. <Common sense makes it obvious that this…
The words I am uttering penetrate your senses, so that every hearer holds them, yet withholds them from no other. Not held, the words could not inform. Withheld, no other could share them. Though my talk is, admittedly, broken up into words and syllables, yet you do not take in this portion or that, as when picking at…
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the…