Human Progress Confounds -isms

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex netw...

 BIDS Approach to Understanding Intelligence

There is nothing really the matter with the concept of g; it is just that we have misused it by making it the omnipresent concept in our study of cognitive abilities. Intelligence is important on three levels, namely, brain physiology, individual differences, and social trends (collectively, BIDS). The core of a BIDS approach to intelligence is that each of those levels has its own organizing concept, and it is a mistake to impose the architectonic concept of one level on another. We have to ...

 We Don't Know if We See the Same Colors

the colours that we finally think we see are labels used for convenience by the brain. I used to be disappointed when I saw 'false colour' images, say, satellite photographs of earth, or computer-constructed images of deep space. The caption tells us that the colours are arbitrary codes, say, for different types of vegetation, in a satellite picture of Africa. I used to think false colour images were a kind of cheat. I wanted to know what the scene 'really' looked like. I now realize that eve...

 Science in the Time of Hordes

The only sciences known to savage hordes, are a slight and crude idea of astronomy, and the knowledge of certain medicinal plants employed in the cure of wounds and diseases; and even these are already corrupted by a mixture of superstition. Meanwhile there is presented to us in this epoch one fact of importance in the history of the human mind. We can here perceive the beginnings of an institution, that in its progress has been attended with opposite effects, accelerating the advancement of...

 We Must Become Comfortable with Large Numbers

Borel makes the amusing supposition of a million monkeys allowed to play upon the keys of a million typewriters. What is the chance that this wanton activity should reproduce exactly all of the volumes which are contained in the library of the British Museum? It certainly is not a large chance, but it may be roughly calculated, and proves in fact to be considerably larger than the chance that a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen will separate into the two pure constituents. After we have learned ...

 The Earliest Account of Newton and the Apple

In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a c...

 Newton's Experiment Proving White Contains All Colors

Newton wasn't the first person to make a rainbow with a prism. Other people had already got the same result. But many of them thought the prism somehow 'coloured' the white light, like adding a dye. Newton's idea was quite different. He thought that white light was a mixture of all the colours, and the prism was just separating them from each other. He was right, and he proved it with a pair of neat experiments. First, he took his prism, as before, and stuck a narrow slit in the way of the co...