The Universe is a Blank Slate

On the black hemisphere, Cassini Regio, the bulge bisects an area where people once upon a time went out in hoppers or rovers and blew the black dust away to make patterns out of exposed white ice. Anytime you can easily make such a contrast in the landscape, people have written out their thoughts for the universe to read. Before the Saturn League was formed, when the first arrivals from Mars had come for Titan’s nitrogen, and were exploring the other moons as well for whatever else might b...

 The Nurture View of Human Nature Spawned Social Programs

Spitz showed that early nurturing and stimulation are essential to child development, and he was not alone in this view. At the time, the field of psychology was dominated by the theory of "behaviorism," which proposed that all our actions, from the simplest smile to the most sophisticated chess move, are learned through reward and punishment, trial-and-error interactions with other people and objects in the world. Babies, according to this view. are born as "blank slates," without predisposi...

 An Experiment With a Tadpole's Development

An early classic experiment by the Nobel Prize-winning embryologist Roger Sperry illustrates the principle perfectly. Sperry and a colleague took a tadpole and removed a tiny square of skin from the back. They removed another square, the same size, from the belly. They then regrafted the two squares, but each in the other's place: the belly skin was grafted on the back, and the back skin on the belly. When the tadpole grew up into a frog, the result was rather pretty, as experiments in embryo...