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Michael Dickmann: Here's what the story is. There was this little tadpole and a fish that grew up in a pond, and they were always intensely curious about life outside the pond. And then, eventually, the tadpole grows into a frog and discovers that, because he's an amphibian, he can go out and see what life is like. So…
As we ascend the scale of cerebral development the possibility of teaching increases. It becomes possible to domesticate and train these higher-brain animals in just the measure that their brains are developed. You can teach very little to a fish or a reptile, but directly you come to the higher cerebral mammals you…
And what, I ask you, are we to think of the viviparous fish, those that actually pair off in no uncertain manner and a little later bring forth living young! (You catch the drift?) What of the Guppyi, the Helleri, the Tetras and Danios and other tropicals with which our apartments are full to overflowing? Well, at…
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word 'simplest'. It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The…
In principle, there should be no limit to the diversity of supernatural beings that humans can imagine. However, as the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has argued, only a limited repertoire of such beings is exploited in human religions. Its members—ghosts, gods, ancestor spirits, dragons, and so on—have in common two…
Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: They are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issues of journals, the millionth copy sold of a record, and so on. This, in turn, creates a special cultural attractor for prices, just below…
吾嘗終日而思矣，不如須臾之所學也。吾嘗跂而望矣，不如登高之博見也。登高而招，臂非加長也，而見者遠；順風而呼，聲非加疾也，而聞者彰。假輿馬者，非利足也，而致千里；假舟楫者，非能水也，而絕江河。君子生非異也，善假於物也。
There were no real sea serpents in the Mesozoic Era, but the plesiosaurs were the next thing to it. The plesiosaurs were reptiles who had gone back to the water because it seemed like a good idea at the time. As they knew little or nothing about swimming, they rowed themselves around in the water with their four…
John Buddle, now entirely won over by Davy, was also concerned about a reward. By August there were 144 safety lamps ‘in daily use’ at Walls End, and they were rapidly spreading to all the other collieries in the North-East.91 Buddle urged Davy to take out a patent, pointing out that he could not only make his fortune…
Here Coleridge was defending the intellectual discipline of science as a force for clarity and good. He then added one of his most inspired perceptions. He thought that science, as a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely…
Native Missing Plants Land mammals Birds Reptiles Insects and other Amphibians arthropods (e.g., spiders) Freshwater fish [...] Further, when you look at the type of insects and plants native to oceanic islands, they are from groups that are the best colonizers. Most of the insects are small, precisely those that…
A good example of bad design is the flounder, whose popularity as an eating fish (Dover sole, for instance) comes partly from its flatness, which makes it easy to bone. There are actually about 500 species of flatfish— halibut, turbot, flounders, and their kin—all placed in the order Pleuronectiformes. The word means…
This is where the prediction comes in. If there were lobe-finned fishes but no terrestrial vertebrates 390 million years ago, and clearly terrestrial vertebrates 360 million years ago, where would you expect to find the transitional forms? Somewhere in between. Following this logic, Shubin predicted that if…
No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings-the things thus grow Until we know and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know. Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms; and even the systems and the suns Shall go…
Pysicists are trying to find out how nature behaves; they may talks carelessly about some "utlimate particle" because that's the way nature looks at a given moment, but... Suppose people are exploring a new continent, OK? They see water coming along the ground, they've seen that before, and they call it "rivers." So…
During the Second World War the hydrophone network set up by the United States Navy to protect the entrance to Chesapeake Bay was temporarily made useless when, in the spring of 1942, the speakers at the surface began to give forth, every evening, a sound described as being like 'a pneumatic drill tearing up…