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“I approve of your wanting true stories,” said he. “You will find in them at the same time the marvelous, which pleases so much at your age, and also the useful, with which even at your age you must concern yourselves, in preparation for after life. Believe me, a true story is much more interesting than a tale in…
The harder we look at the border between life and non-life, the more elusive does the distinction become. Life, the animate, was supposed to have some sort of vibrant, throbbing quality, some vital essence - made to sound yet more mysterious when dropped into French: elan vital. Life, it seemed, was made of a special…
If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea - watery, salty alma mater of all life. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals from many different animal groups moved out on to the land, sometimes eventually to the most parched deserts, taking their own private sea water with them…
So glibly do the phrases 'higher animals' and 'lower animals' trip off our tongues that it comes as a shock to realize that, far from effortlessly slotting into evolutionary thinking as one might suppose, they were - and are - deeply antithetical to it. We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and…
Textbooks of biology repeat time and again that DNA is a 'blueprint' for building a body. It isn't. A true blueprint of, say, a car or a house embodies a one-toone mapping from paper to finished product. It follows from this that a blueprint is reversible. It is as easy to go from house to blueprint as the other way…
Of all the elements, carbon is the one that seems most indispensable to life - the one without which life on any planet is hardest to envisage. This is because of carbon's remarkable capacity for forming chains and rings and other complex molecular architectures. It enters the food web via photosynthesis, which is the…
Of all the elements, carbon is the one that seems most indispensable to life - the one without which life on any planet is hardest to envisage. This is because of carbon's remarkable capacity for forming chains and rings and other complex molecular architectures. It enters the food web via photosynthesis, which is the…
One might glance at some of the special tortures at Bamberg, for example, such as the forcible feeding of the accused on herrings cooked in salt, followed by denial of water - a sophisticated method which went side by side with immersion of the accused in baths of scalding water to which lime had been added. Other…
Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and the germ…
Quinine comes from an infusion of the bark of a particular tree from the Amazon rain forest. How did pre-modern people ever discover that a tea made from this tree, of all the plants in the forest, would relieve the symptoms of malaria? They must have tried every tree and every plant - roots, stems, bark, leaves…
T.H. Huxley's formulation was The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. Clement, Hume, Paine and Huxley were all talking about religion. But much of what they…
A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.
It was from Kuiper that I first got a feeling for what is called a back-of-the-envelope calculation: a possible explanation to a problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approximate equations on the envelope, substitute in likely numerical…
Then for more than a million years people lived in a way that couldn't have changed much. They inhabited grasslands and woodland savannas, first in Africa, later in Eurasia, and eventually in Australasia and the Americas. They hunted animals for food, gathered fruits and seeds, and were highly social within each tribe…
t. Baker and Bellis discovered that the amount of sperm that is retained in a woman's vagina after sex varies according to whether she had an orgasm and when. It also depends on how long it was since she last had sex: The longer the period, the more sperm stays in, unless she has what the scientists call "a…
Biologists have persistently overestimated the importance of physical causes of premature death rather than biological ones. In virtually any account of evolution, drought, frost, wind, or starvation looms large as the enemy of life. The great struggle, we are told, is to adapt to these conditions. Marvels of physical…
think the lack of reusability comes in object-oriented mguages, not in functional languages. Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. Vou i wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle…
Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do…
The problem is: We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and…
A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involvesinductive reasoning. For instance, if an…