21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Childlike Curiosity is a Virtue
As a species, humans manifest a quality called neoteny, the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Neoteny has physical ramifications—scarce body hair and a flat face are two examples—but it also has neurological ones. Namely, we have an extraordinary capacity to continue learning throughout life.
If neoteny helps to explain our ability to learn, researchers are now figuring out what drives us to take advantage of it. In 2008, a group of scientists set up a novel fMRI stu...
2 An neotenatal evolutionary adaptation that allows us lifelong learning.
12 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Curiosity is More Important Than Doing Good
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators. What animates a great pathologist? Is it the desire to cure disease, to save life? Surely not, save perhaps as an afterthought. He is too intelligent, deep down in h... 1 
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notesMore good has been done through curiosity.
17 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Scientists are Like Children
Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of. 1 notes
notesThey must have curiosity to be successful, and they may have other childish behaviors with this.
05 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Creationsim VS "I Don't Know"
Where did the primal seed of the big bang come from? How did life begin? How did monarch butterflies evolve the ability to navigate to their winter home? God did it, says the believer. I don't know, says the agnostic. The two statements have exactly the same explanatory value. Zero.
Why then opt for one rather than the other? The first provides an illusion of understanding, and reinforces the ancient belief in a personal divinity who attends to our individual lives. The second is a goad to c...Neither explains any natural phenomena, but the latter leads the door open to curiosity.
04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Schools Kill a Child's Curiosity
All children are curious and I wonder by what process this trait becomes developed in some and suppressed in others. I suspect again that schools and colleges help in the suppression insofar as they meet curiosity by giving the answers, rather than by some method that leads from narrower questions to broader questions. It is hard to satisfy the curiosity of a child, and even harder to satisfy the curiosity of a scientist, and methods that meet curiosity with satisfaction are thus not apt to f... 1 notes
notesBy giving them answers instead of letting them find the answers themselves. If adults maintained a questioning attitude, they would question authority.
12 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Looking One's Imminent Death with Curiosity
I like to remember the distinguished Swedish oceanographer, Otto Pettersson, who died a few years ago at the age of ninety-three, in full possession of his keen mental powers. His son has related in a recent book how intensely his father enjoyed every new experience, every new discovery concerning the world about him.
"He was an incurable romantic," the son wrote, "intensely in love with life and with the mysteries of the universe." When he realized he had not much longer to enjoy the earthl... 1 notes
notesAn oceanographer is curious as to what it will be like.
