Biology Student Quotes

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When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
Richard P. Feynman (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character)
[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods] Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.
James D. Watson
Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution.
Jonathan Wells (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design)
It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe--until recently--have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning...I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.
T.S. Eliot (Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture)
Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.
Alexandra Robbins (The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School)
The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.
Vladimir L. Voeikov
Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.
Kevin Carey (The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere)
A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys. Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking and giving adults testosterone enhances their math skills. Oh, okay, it's biological. But consider a paper published in science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in 40 countries based on economic, educational and political indices of gender equality. The worst was Turkey, United States was middling, and naturally, the Scandinavians were tops. Low and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys. Footnote, note that the other reliable sex difference in cognition, namely better reading performance by girls than by boys doesn't disappear in more gender equal societies. It gets bigger. In other words, culture matters. We carry it with us wherever we go.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
(...) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language)
COVID-19 may cause a shortage of doctors and nurses due to students not wanting to enter the biologically hazardous profession.
Steven Magee
As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.
Terry Pratchett (The Science of Discworld (The Science of Discworld, #1))
I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards. I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester; and that the latter upon reading on her dissecting board That time of year Thou may’st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold— Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang. might catch fire at the beauty of it.
Walker Percy (The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other)
Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.
Christopher Michael Langan
Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno.
Walter Isaacson
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better.
B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.
Karen Armstrong
The amygdala also helps mediate both innate and learned fear.18 The core of innate fear (aka a phobia) is that you don’t have to learn by trial and error that something is aversive. For example, a rat born in a lab, who has interacted only with other rats and grad students, instinctually fears and avoids the smell of cats.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
To become comfortable in silence may be the first step in becoming comfortable with death because, on the most basic biological level, death and silence are the same. Conversely, being comfortable in the silence may be the first step in pursuing life. As I would come to learn, death may not be so horrible after all. In fact, death may be the most beautiful thing about this human experiment. But I believe we can only see the positive in death when we learn to accept the silence. When we're able to tap that reservoir of bravery and lay aside all our words against death, and sit, not as the teacher of death, but as the student, listening to what death has to say in the silence, this is the first step.
Caleb Wilde (Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life)
A study of 222 white medical students and residents published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 showed that half of the students and residents endorsed at least one false idea about biological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than those of white people.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
time, cost, or safety concerns. • MasteringBiology: Virtual Biology Labs offer unique learning experiences in microscopy, molecular biology, genetics, ecology, and systematics. • Choose from 20–30 automatically graded, “pre-set” lab activities that are ready to assign to students, or create your own from scratch. • Each “pre-set” lab provides an assignable
Neil A. Campbell (Campbell Biology)
ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed “fight or flight” stress response. To use the feeble joke told to first-year medical students, the SNS mediates the “four Fs—fear, fight, flight, and sex.” Particular midbrain/brain-stem nuclei send long SNS projections down the spine and on to outposts throughout the body, where the axon terminals release the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.
William Finnegan (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner))
ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they adopted Steve soon after his birth in 1955. ERIN JOBS. Middle child of Laurene Powell and
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon} He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world. Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence. He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable.
Ernst W. Mayr
Because if one continues teaching young people that man is nothing but the battleground of the clashing claims of personality aspects such as Id, Ego and Superego, or if one continues preaching that man is nothing but the victim of conditions and determinants, be they biological, psychological or sociological in nature and origin, we cannot expect our students to behave like free and responsible beings. They rather become what they are taught to be, i.e., a set of mechanisms. Thus a pandeterministic indoctrination makes young people increasingly susceptible to manipulation.
Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry.
William King Gregory
You knew she was sick,” her mother said. She was trying to comfort her or maybe just alleviate her shock. “I know,” Jude said. “Still.” “It wasn’t painful. She was smilin and talkin to me, right up until the end.” “Are you all right, Mama?” “Oh, you know me.” “That’s why I’m asking.” Her mother laughed a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Anyway, the service is Friday. I just wanted to let you know. I know you’re busy with school—” “Friday?” Jude said. “I’ll fly down—” “Hold on. No use in you comin all the way down here—” “My grandmother is dead,” Jude said. “I’m coming home.” Her mother didn’t try to dissuade her further. Jude was grateful for that. She’d already acted as if notifying her of her grandmother’s passing had been some inconvenience. What type of life did her mother think she was living that she couldn’t interrupt with that type of news? They hung up and Jude stepped out into the hallway. Students buzzed past. A friend from the biology department waved his coffee at her as he ducked into the lounge. A weedy orange-haired girl tacked a green poster for a protest onto the announcement board. That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62
Bryan Caplan (The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies)
For the rest of Kat’s childhood, she moved from one relative’s house to another’s, up and down the East Coast, living in four homes before entering high school. Finally, in high school, she lived for a few years with her grandmother, her mom’s mom, whom she called “G-Ma.” No one ever talked about her mom’s murder. “In my family, my past was ‘The Big Unmentionable’—including my role in putting my own father in jail,” she says. In high school, Kat appeared to be doing well. She was an honor student who played four varsity sports. Beneath the surface, however, “I was secretly self-medicating with alcohol because otherwise, by the time everything stopped and it got quiet at night, I could not sleep, I would just lie there and a terrible panic would overtake me.” She went to college, failed out, went back, and graduated. She went to work in advertising, and one day, dissatisfied, quit. She went back to grad school, piling up debt. She became a teacher. Kat quit that job too, when a relationship she had formed with another teacher imploded. At the age of thirty-four, Kat went to stay with her brother and his family in Hawaii. She got a job as a valet, parking cars. “I’d come home from parking cars all day and curl up on my bed in the back bedroom of my brother’s house, and lie there feeling desperate and alone, my heart beating with anxiety.
Donna Jackson Nakazawa (Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal)
Teachers seeking to 'teach the controversy' over Darwinian evolution in today's climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise questions about Darwinism, or who try to elicit from the teacher an honest answer about the status of intelligent design theory will trigger administrators' concerns about whether they stand in Constitutional jeopardy. A chilling effect on open inquiry is being felt in several states already, including Ohio. South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. [District Court] Judge Jones's message is clear: give Darwin only praise, or else face the wrath of the judiciary.
David K. DeWolf (Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision)
She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biological craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe. ... She thought of a line from Nabokov: "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage - not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game.
Chris Bohjalian (The Guest Room)
You only needed one yes to be happy—medical school was like love in that regard. Some days her chances seemed promising, and other days she hated herself for clinging to this ridiculous dream. Hadn't she muddled her way through chemistry? Struggled in biology? You needed more than a good GPA to get into medical school. You had to compete against students who'd grown up in rich families, attended private schools, hired personal tutors. People who had been dreaming since kindergarten of becoming doctors. Who had family photos of themselves in tiny white coats, holding plastic stethoscopes to teddy bear bellies. Not people who grew up in nowhere towns, where there was one doctor you only saw when you were puking sick. Not people who'd stumbled into the whole idea of medical school after dissecting a sheep's heart in an anatomy class.
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
an important point, throughout this book, whenever I describe work done by Jane Doe or Joe Smith, I actually mean “work done by Doe and a team of her postdocs, technicians, grad students, and collaborators spread far and wide over the years.” I’ll be referring solely to Doe or Smith for brevity, not to imply that they did all the work on their own—science is utterly a team process. In addition, as long as we’re at it, another point: At endless junctures throughout the book, I’ll be reporting the results of a study, along the lines of, “And when you do whatever to this or that brain region/neurotransmitter/hormone/gene/etc., X happens.” What I mean is that on the average X happens, and at a statistically reliable rate. There is always lots of variability, including individuals in whom nothing happens or even the opposite of X occurs.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.' In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease than black patients are. When asked to read case studies of two patients complaining of pain, one white and one black, the respondents who had endorsed more false beliefs were more likely to believe that the black patient felt less pain, and undertreated them accordingly.
Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
Stress physiologists have found a biological explanation for this phenomenon as well. The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet. And in fact, when kindergarten teachers are surveyed about their students, they say that the biggest problem they face is not children who don’t know their letters and numbers; it is kids who don’t know how to manage their tempers or calm themselves down after a provocation.
Paul Tough (How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character)
In biology, the most basic assumptions of evolutionary theory elude otherwise able students who insist that the process of evolution is guided by a striving toward perfection. College students who have studied economics offer explanations of market forces that are essentially identical to those preferred by college students who have never taken an economics course. Equally severe biases and stereotypes pervade the humanistic segment of the curriculum, from history to art. Students who can discuss in detail the complex causes of the First World War turn right around and explain equally complex current events in terms of the simplest "good guy-bad guy" scenario. (This habit of mind is not absent from political leaders, who are fond of portraying the most complicated international situations along the lines of a Hollywood script.) Those who have studied the intricacies of modern poetry, learning to esteem T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, show little capacity to distinguish masterworks from amateurish drivel once the identity of the author has been hidden from view.
Howard Gardner (The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach)
The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another. No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish: A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it. Post-Graduate Student: “That’s only a sun-fish” Agassiz: “I know that. Write a description of it.” After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichterinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject. Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish. The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of the three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it. — ABC of Reading (1934; New Directions)
Ezra Pound
here’s where it gets confusing. In spiritual life, the same word is used to describe both the archetype of the divine Guide and a human teacher—who may or may not be enlightened. In India, your music teacher, your Sanskrit teacher, or even your biology teacher might be addressed as guruji, because all teachers are considered worthy of respect. In the same way, in spiritual life, you may first meet the guru-principle through a teacher or mentor who happens to be a fairly ordinary human being with some spiritual knowledge. In Sanskrit, one name for this kind of teacher is acharya, meaning “the one who instructs.” The therapist who introduces you to deep breathing, the yoga teacher who takes you into your first meditative shavasana, and the author of your favorite meditation book are all important for your practice at different stages. (And any of them, in traditional India, might be addressed as “guruji” or “respected teacher.”) Different acharyas can provide particular kinds of instruction. If you’re a serious student, you’ll learn to recognize who can help you at each stage, when to stay with a teacher despite doubts or resistances, and when it might be time to move on.
Sally Kempton (Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience)
Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity. This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology. Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world. Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation. Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests? What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.
David George Haskell (The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature)
It was also a lot easier for online teachers to hold their students’ attention, because here in the OASIS, the classrooms were like holodecks. Teachers could take their students on a virtual field trip every day, without ever leaving the school grounds. During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut’s tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we’d visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamun’s empire in all its glory.) In my next class, Biology, we traveled through a human heart and watched it pumping from the inside, just like in that old movie Fantastic Voyage. In Art class we toured the Louvre while all of our avatars wore silly berets. In my Astronomy class we visited each of Jupiter’s moons. We stood on the volcanic surface of Io while our teacher explained how the moon had originally formed. As our teacher spoke to us, Jupiter loomed behind her, filling half the sky, its Great Red Spot churning slowly just over her left shoulder. Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon’s icy crust.
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1))
A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile on the math SAT, there were eleven boys. Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking, and giving adults testosterone enhances some math skills. Oh, okay, it’s biological. But consider a paper published in Science in 2008.1 The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops). Lo and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it’s statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Still, the alien biologist might be excused for lumping together the whole biosphere - all the retroviruses, mantas, foraminifera, mongongo trees, tetanus bacilli, hydras, diatoms, stromatolite-builders, sea slugs, flatworms, gazelles lichens, corals, spirochetes, banyans, cave ticks, least bitters, caracaras, tufted puffins, ragweed pollen, wold spiders, horseshoe crabs, black mambas, monarch butterflies, whiptail lizards, trypanosomes, birds of paradise, electric eels, wild parsnips, arctic terns, fireflies, titis, chrysanthemums, hammerhead sharks, rotifers, wallabies, malarial plasmodia, tapirs, aphids, water moccasins, morning glories, whooping cranes, komodo dragons, periwinkles millipede larvae, angler fish, jellyfish lungfish, yeast, giant redwoods, tardigrades, archaebacteria, sea lilies, lilies of the valley, humans bonobos, squid and humpback whales - as, simply, Earthlife. The arcane distinctions among these swarming variations on a common theme may be left to specialists or graduate students. The pretensions and conceits of this or that species can readily be ignored. There are, after-all, so many worlds about which an extraterrestrial biologist must know. It will be enough if a few salient and generic characteristics of life on yet another obscure planet are noted for the cavernous recesses of the galactic archives.
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads - now here is a fellow who does have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it.
Walker Percy
This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.
Noel Ignatiev
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy There are almost no pure cognitive or behavioral therapists. Instead, most therapists use a combination of both techniques. This is known as cognitive-behavioral therapy. It is generally recognized as the best therapy for social anxiety. In cognitive-behavioral therapy, a therapist helps you identity maladaptive thinking patterns and replace them with new ways of thinking. He or she also teaches you relaxation techniques and new behaviors that make you feel more comfortable in social situations. Cognitive-behavioral therapy uses many of the same techniques that we explored in the previous chapter. Although you might make great strides on your own, sometimes it is easier and faster to have someone guide you. Often it is difficult for people to explore hidden beliefs about themselves. A professional therapist is experienced in working with people who are trying to change. Often a therapist will see connections in your situation that you cannot. Carlos was terrified of speaking in class. Whenever the teacher called on him, his heart raced, he blushed, and his stomach felt upset. His therapist first had him focus on his thoughts during class. As an experiment, she had him purposely answer a question incorrectly during biology class. To his surprise, the teacher didn’t make a big deal out of it, and the other students didn’t laugh. As a result, Carlos realized that his imagined consequences for making errors were greatly exaggerated. He also realized that he held himself to a higher standard than other people, including the teacher, did. Next, his therapist showed him various relaxation techniques to lessen the physical symptoms of anxiety. Soon, he felt more comfortable and even volunteered to lead a discussion group.
Heather Moehn (Social Anxiety (Coping With Series))
It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them—if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to making progress. Of course there are times when it is really important not to make any mistakes—ask any surgeon or airline pilot. But it is less widely appreciated that there are also times when making mistakes is the only way to go. Many of the students who arrive at very competitive universities pride themselves in not making mistakes—after all, that’s how they’ve come so much farther than their classmates, or so they have been led to believe. I often find that I have to encourage them to cultivate the habit of making mistakes, the best learning opportunities of all. They get “writer’s block” and waste hours forlornly wandering back and forth on the starting line. “Blurt it out!” I urge them. Then they have something on the page to work with. We philosophers are mistake specialists. (I know, it sounds like a bad joke, but hear me out.) While other disciplines specialize in getting the right answers to their defining questions, we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are of getting things so mixed up, so deeply wrong, that nobody is even sure what the right questions are, let alone the answers. Asking the wrongs questions risks setting any inquiry off on the wrong foot. Whenever that happens, this is a job for philosophers! Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place. Some people hate it when that happens. They would rather take their questions off the rack, all nicely tailored and pressed and cleaned and ready to answer. Those who feel that way can do physics or mathematics or history or biology. There’s plenty of work for everybody. We philosophers have a taste for working on the questions that need to be straightened out before they can be answered. It’s not for everyone. But try it, you might like it. In
Daniel C. Dennett (Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking)
The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within the material world is for some people so exotic as to be inconceivable. Yet nothing should be more fundamentally clear, as students of
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare)
...only in the late 1100s and 1200s did scholars in Sicily and Spain translate Aristotle's greatest philosophical and scientific texts. These translations had an impact reminiscent of those science fiction stories in which the world suddenly encounters a civilization far in advance of its own. Aristotle had systematically answered the widest range of questions on everything from ethics to physics to biology. Students flocked to the universities advertising that they taught Aristotle. For Christian theologians, all of this posed at least two problems. First, the whole Augustinian tradition had taught that faith provided the standpoint from which one could understand the world correctly. Since Aristotle had not been a Christian, how had he managed to understand so much? Second, most theologians had drawn on the idea, going back to Aristotle's teacher Plato, that the road to knowledge involves turning away from the senses and looking inward to the truths of the soul. Aristotle, on the other hand, taught that all knowledge begins with sense observation.
William C. Placher (A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction)
This was the greatest day ever. This morning as you walked to school, you saved a child’s life by pulling him out of the way of an oncoming bus. Then you got an A-plus on a huge biology test even though you studied for only forty-five seconds. Then you were named Student of the Millennium in your school. With the award you were given a brand-new sports car, an all-expenses-paid trip to the moon, and a statue of yourself that will grace the courtyard at your school for all eternity. Then you hit the game-winning home run for your school’s baseball team. There happened to be a major-league scout in the stands, and he wants you to be the new cleanup hitter for the New York Yankees. Your starting salary will be eight billion dollars. What a day! It was so good that you went home that night, sat on your bed, and told . . . no one. Of course not! If you had a day like that, you would tell everyone! You’d throw a party for six hundred of your closest friends to announce what happened. Right? Well, becoming a Christian is actually way better than all of those things. The statue and the eight billion dollars will fade away some day. But the decision to follow Jesus will mean something for all eternity.
AIOTeam (90 Devotions for Kids (Adventures in Odyssey Books Book 9))
Japanese researchers blindfolded a group of students and told them their right arms were being rubbed with a poison ivy plant. Afterward, all 13 of the students’ arms reacted with the classic symptoms of poison ivy: itching, boils, and redness. Not surprising until you find out that the plant used for the study wasn’t poison ivy at all, just a harmless shrub. The students’ beliefs were actually strong enough to create the biological effects of poison ivy, even though no such plant had touched them. Then, on the students’ other arm, the researchers rubbed actual poison ivy, but told them it was a harmless plant. Even though all 13 students were highly allergic, only two of them broke out into the poison ivy rash!
Chris Estes (The A.P.P.L.E. Principle)
neighborhood. So the school, being unable to utilize this everyday experience, sets painfully to work, on another tack and by a variety of means, to arouse in the child an interest in school studies. (Dewey, 1959, pp. 76–77) During Dewey’s tenure at the University of Chicago, he and his colleagues created a model of an educational process that sought to immerse children in those fundamental community activities from which the contemporary academic disciplines have emerged. Using such perennial vocations as gardening, cooking, carpentry, and clothing manufacture, students at the Laboratory School were drawn into the forms of problem-solving and investigation that led to the invention of biology, mathematics, chemistry,
Gregory A. Smith (Place- and Community-Based Education in Schools)
Mr. White is a biology professor at a posh suburban girl’s school. One day during class he says, “Miss Smith, would you name the organ in the human body which, under the appropriate conditions, expands to six times its normal size? And please define the conditions.” “Mr. White,” the student gasps, “I don’t think that is a proper question to ask me. I assure you that my parents will hear of this.” With that, she sits down red faced. Unperturbed, Mr. White asks Miss Jones the same question. With complete composure she replies, “Why, of course, it is the pupil of the eye, which expands in dim light.” “Correct,” says the teacher. “Now, Miss Smith, I have three things to say to you: one, you have not studied your lessons. Two, you have a dirty mind. And three, you will someday be faced with a dreadful disappointment.
Barry Dougherty (Friars Club Private Joke File: More Than 2,000 Very Naughty Jokes from the Grand Masters of Comedy)
stem
Bruce M. Carlson (Human Embryology and Developmental Biology [with Student Consult Online Access])
The polarized outer cells are destined to become trophoblast, whereas those cells located in the interior are destined to become the inner cell mass, from
Bruce M. Carlson (Human Embryology and Developmental Biology [with Student Consult Online Access])
Experimental evidence suggests that a key element underlying a daughter cell's becoming an outer cell is inheritance of a patch of outer cell membrane containing microvilli and the actin microfilament-stabilizing protein, ezrin. The proteins that produce polarity in the outer cells are postulated to direct their differentiation toward the trophoblastic lineage. Common to the inside-outside hypothesis and the cell polarity model is the recognition that a cell that does not contact the surface does not differentiate into trophoblast, but rather becomes part of the inner cell mass.
Bruce M. Carlson (Human Embryology and Developmental Biology [with Student Consult Online Access])
Fig. 3.7 The cell polarity model of differentiation of blastomeres. A, If the plane of cleavage of a blastomere is perpendicular to the surface of the embryo, each daughter cell becomes trophoblast. B, If the plane of cleavage is parallel to the surface, the daughter blastomere located at the surface becomes trophoblast, whereas the daughter cell located on the interior becomes part of the inner cell mass. Even though by the 16-cell stage the
Bruce M. Carlson (Human Embryology and Developmental Biology [with Student Consult Online Access])
Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which (as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
William James (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality)
After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent. On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that “there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.” He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House—and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race—the governing and self-governing race.” Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, “[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . .” Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . .” As for Indians, he once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.” William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, “Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times.” Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that “civilized white men” could not be expected to work with “barbarous black men.” During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: “I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.” Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: “Men of both races [black and white] may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
As whites cease to be the mainstream, their interests become less important. In 2008, the College Board, the New York-based non profit that administers Advanced Placement (AP) tests, announced it was dropping AP courses and exams in Italian, Latin literature, and French literature. Blacks and Hispanics are not interested in those subjects, and they were the groups the College Board wanted to reach. In Berkeley, California, the governance council for the school district came up with a novel plan for bridging the racial achievement gap: eliminate all science labs, fire the five teachers who run them, and spend the money on “underperforming” students. The council explained that science labs were used mainly by white students, so they were a natural target for cuts. Many schools have slashed enriched programs for gifted students because so few blacks and Hispanics qualify for them. Evanston Township High School in Illinois prides itself on diversity and academic excellence but, like so many others, is dismayed that the two do not always go together. In 2010 it eliminated its elite freshman honors courses in English because hardly any blacks or Hispanics met the admission criteria. The honors biology course was scheduled for elimination the next year.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
The most innovative schools, from the established Montessori to the new-age MUSE, know this and have modeled themselves accordingly. Students in these schools don’t learn geometry from a textbook; they learn it by building real structures and observing real phenomena. They don’t study biology by listening to a teacher drone on; they learn it by cultivating gardens that feed the entire school.
Jonathan A. Levi (The Only Skill that Matters: The Proven Methodology to Read Faster, Remember More, and Become a SuperLearner)
1. Helping students get clear on the intention they want to create in their future; 2. Programing their conscious mind, as well as their unconscious mind, into that new future; 3. Changing their brain and body to biologically look like the future has already happened; 4. Repeatedly associating those pictures and images with music to create new neural networks in the brain and to emotionally recondition the body to a new mind. It’s a way for them to remember their future.
Joe Dispenza (Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon)
1.4 billion dollars can buy 1.4 million teachers $1,000 of classroom supplies, 14 million free computers for students, or 1 biologically toxic telescope atop the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Steven Magee
Some students choose double majors in college not because they’re trying to prove something or because they have some grand plan for a career integrating, say, political science and biology. Rather, they just can’t bring themselves to say no to either option. To choose a single major is to pronounce judgment on the other and kill it off, and there’s abundant research showing that people have a hard time giving up options, even when the options aren’t doing them any good.
Roy F. Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength)
In 1963, Choh Hao Li, chairman and lone tenured faculty member in the Institute of Experimental Biology at Berkeley, announced that he had isolated and purified his sixth pituitary hormone, lipotropin. The magnitude of such a feat is clear considering that only one other person had ever purified a hormone, and that person was not coincidentally a student of Li's. The purification of lipotropin should have been a reason to celebrate; however, Li's colleagues at Berkeley acknowledged but did not rejoice in his success. As they perceived it, endocrinology was a scientific field that came out of the clinical sciences, which meant that Li's research was completely unsound, and they put enormous pressure on him to change his scientific topic. When that did not work, Wendell Stanley tried to 'promote [Li] out of the Virus Laboratory,' then later University Chancellor Clark Kerr threatened to discontinue the Institute for Experimental Biology because it did not fit with Berkeley's commitment to pure research. Things got infinitely worse for Li, of course, because he became perceived as less qualified with each professional achievement. [...] C. H. Li's travails at Berkeley are only half the story. In 1969, five years after transferring from Berkeley to UCSF, Li and his laboratory assistants assembled a highly complex synthetic version of human growth hormone (HGH) that was biologically active and could promote the growth of bones and muscle tissue. Rather than ignore or criticize the work, however, journalists waxed eloquently [sic] about Li's creation of HGH. One described it as no less than a panacea for most of the world's problems. Others clearly saw specific applications: 'it might now be . . . possible to tailor-make hormones that can inhibit breast cancer.' Li's discovery of synthetic HGH 'constituted a truly . . . great research breakthrough [that had] obvious applications,' ranging from 'human growth and development to . . . treatment of cancer and coronary artery disease.' Desperate letters poured in too; athletes wanted to know if HGH would help them become faster, bigger, stronger, and dwarfs from all over the world begged for samples of HGH or to volunteer as experimental subjects. Unlike at Berkeley, Li's discovery made him a hero at UCSF. None other than UCSF Chancellor Phillip Lee described Li's discovery as 'meticulous, painstaking, and brilliant research' and then tried to capitalize on the moment by asking the public and their political representatives to increase federal support of bioscience research. 'Research money is dwindling fast,' repeated Lee to anyone who cared to listen. 'We've proven than synthesis can be done, now all we need is the money and time to prove its tremendous value.' It is not surprising that federal and state money began to pour into Li's lab. What is shocking, however, is how quickly Li achieved scientific acclaim, not because he changed, but because the rest of the world around him changed so much.
Eric J. Vettel (Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry (Politics and Culture in Modern America))
Science has advanced considerably since the 1970s. In subsequent editions of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins scrapped his assertions about humans’ innate selfishness, and the theory has lost credence with biologists. Although struggle and competition clearly factor into the evolution of life, every first-year biology student now learns that cooperation is much more critical.
Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
Clifford” is an important psychedelic researcher, group leader, and writer. He is currently writing a book of personal essays. Student days at the University of California at San Diego were a whirlwind blending of 1960s’ issues with the academic pressure necessary to enter postgraduate training of some sort. My personal choices were between psychology and medicine. My introduction to psychedelics had convinced me of their value. I was taking a biology course to prepare for medical school, and we were studying the development of the chick embryo. After the first meeting of the one-quarter-long course, I realized that in order to stay alert, a tiny dose of LSD could be useful. With that in mind, I licked a small, but very potent, tablet emblazoned with the peace sign before every class. This produced a barely noticeable brightening of colors and created a generalized fascination with the course and my professor, who was otherwise uninteresting to me. Unfortunately, when finals came around, my health disintegrated and I missed the final exam. The next day I called my professor and begged for mercy. She said, “No problem, come to my lab.” “When shall we schedule this?” She suggested immediately. With some dismay, I agreed that I would meet her within an hour. I reached into the freezer and licked the almost exhausted fragment of the tablet I had used for class. I decided that there was so little left I might as well swallow it all. At
James Fadiman (The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys)
I kicked my flip-flops off and pulled my knees to my chest. Mason sprawled next to me, his head propped on a pillow. His legs, which almost hung off the end of the tiny bed, were crossed at the ankle. “How was work?” I asked. He rolled his eyes and grumbled about the students who used the computer lab, compatibility issues and a whole bunch of other stuff I didn’t understand. Being that he was a computer science major, he was always frustrated by questions he found dumb. I tried to be supportive by letting him vent, but I also enjoyed giving him a hard time about it. I stared blankly at him. “I’m sorry, you’re speaking nerd again.” “You’re hilarious. Considering you’re fluent in it.” He made his voice girly. “Did you hear about the nucleotide enzymatic compound synthesis?” I bit back my smile. “That doesn’t even make sense. And I don’t sound like that. But I am impressed you remembered all that from Biology.” “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to use all those words in one sentence.” I laughed as he grinned proudly
Renita Pizzitola (Just a Little Crush (Crush, #1))
The methodical implementation of modern human faculties that allow us human beings to transcend the physical limits of biological evolution is Education. However, today, the term education has become somehow synonymous with economic benefits and due to the primeval craving for security, it has disgracefully lost its very core of transcendence into the unknown. Thus, the very evolutionary seeds that gave birth to the method known as education have gone almost extinct in the modern industrialized system of soulless competition and regurgitation. Hence emerged the reason for me to get to the root of its quite unofficially accepted problems, and to concoct the thought processes that would make necessary amendments to the perceptual errors of what I call the three major nodes of education system, which are the teachers, the students and the parents.
Abhijit Naskar (The Education Decree)
Muller's passion for marine biology suffered a severe blow when a trip to the coast of Norway in the company of his students W. Schmidt and A. Schneider ended in tragedy. The boat carrying them back from Christiansand was shipwrecked. Muller and Schneider were able to swim to safety, but Schmidt drowned. As Haeckel wrote, "the long and awful struggle in the waves during that black night made an indelible impression on Muller. Since then, a deep and insuperable horror has taken the place of his particular fondness for the sea. He has never again been able to entrust himself to that deceptive element, either aboard a slight barque or a solid steamship. Muller's subsequent work on the radiolarians was thus rather limited.
Olaf Breidbach (Art Forms from the Ocean: The Radiolarian Prints of Ernst Haeckel)
Science Fiction is a group of symptoms and not a disease,” so a medical student (failed) told me once. “It's like the old disease hydropsy that doctors treated for so long before discovering that it was only a collection of symptoms, sometimes for a heart disease, sometimes for a liver or kidney disease, or sometimes even for a septic throat.” Well, the symptoms for Science Fiction are a prowling avidity to search out and read certain occult texts; an uneasiness or excitement that permates the whole routine of life; it's the ‘itchy ears’, as mentioned in Scripture, seeking for ‘new things’. The symptoms are usually a falcon-like hunting or questing; a series of sudden tuneful encounters; a group of euphorias and buoyancies that cry in opposite directions to be hoarded like misers' treasures and simultaneously to be shared with fellow sufferers of the symptoms; feeling that the ‘World We Live In’ is somehow masked and needs to be unmasked. These and other symptoms indicate either a strange disease or diseases, or they indicate a perpetually new kind of health. Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.
R.A. Lafferty (It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (Essays on Fantastic Literature 1))
New York Times article from March 8, 1953, titled “Looking Back Two Billion Years.” “Obviously,” Edmond said, “this experiment raised some eyebrows. The implications could have been earth-shattering, especially for the religious world. If life magically appeared inside this test tube, we would know conclusively that the laws of chemistry alone are indeed enough to create life. We would no longer require a supernatural being to reach down from heaven and bestow upon us the spark of Creation. We would understand that life simply happens…as an inevitable by-product of the laws of nature. More importantly, we would have to conclude that because life spontaneously appeared here on earth, it almost certainly did the same thing elsewhere in the cosmos, meaning: man is not unique; man is not at the center of God’s universe; and man is not alone in the universe.” Edmond exhaled. “However, as many of you may know, the Miller-Urey experiment failed. It produced a few amino acids, but nothing even closely resembling life. The chemists tried repeatedly, using different combinations of ingredients, different heat patterns, but nothing worked. It seemed that life—as the faithful had long believed—required divine intervention. Miller and Urey eventually abandoned their experiments. The religious community breathed a sigh of relief, and the scientific community went back to the drawing board.” He paused, an amused glimmer in his eyes. “That is, until 2007…when there was an unexpected development.” Edmond now told the tale of how the forgotten Miller-Urey testing vials had been rediscovered in a closet at the University of California in San Diego after Miller’s death. Miller’s students had reanalyzed the samples using far more sensitive contemporary techniques—including liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry—and the results had been startling. Apparently, the original Miller-Urey experiment had produced many more amino acids and complex compounds than Miller had been able to measure at the time. The new analysis of the vials even identified several important nucleobases—the building blocks of RNA, and perhaps eventually…DNA. “It was an astounding science story,” Edmond concluded, “relegitimizing the notion that perhaps life does simply happen…without divine intervention. It seemed the Miller-Urey experiment had indeed been working, but just needed more time to gestate. Let’s remember one key point: life evolved over billions of years, and these test tubes had been sitting in a closet for just over fifty. If the timeline of this experiment were measured in miles, it was as if our perspective were limited to only the very first inch…” He let that thought hang in the air. “Needless to say,” Edmond went on, “there was a sudden resurgence in interest surrounding the idea of creating life in a lab.” I remember that, Langdon thought. The Harvard biology faculty had thrown
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
Nemenyi was a friend whom Regina had first met when she was a student at the University of Colorado in Denver and then later reconnected with in Chicago. He may have been Bobby’s biological father. The patrimony has never been proven one way or the other. Regina not only denied that Nemenyi was Bobby’s father, but once stated for the record to a social worker that she’d traveled to Mexico
Frank Brady (Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness)
First, caloric intake increases in response to exercise—we just eat more following a vigorous workout. (They don’t call it ‘working up an appetite’ for nothing.) A prospective cohort study of 538 students from the Harvard School of Public Health found that ‘although physical activity is thought of as an energy deficit activity, our estimates do not support this hypothesis.’15 For every extra hour of exercise, the kids ate an extra 292 calories. Caloric intake and expenditure are intimately related: increasing one will cause an increase in the other. This is the biological principle of homeostasis.
Jason Fung (The Obesity Code)
After you’ve decided on a place to study MBBS abroad, the following step is to choose the best medical university. MBBS abroad offers its students a plethora of alternatives and chances. Here are some pointers to help you choose the top medical university in the world to study MBBS. Learn about the university’s rating. The university’s experience in teaching MBBS The university’s recognition Fees for tuition and living expenses Whether or if the university provides FMGE coaching Indian cuisine is available at the hostel canteen. Examine the number of Indian students enrolled at the university. Admission Procedures for MBBS Programs Abroad MBBS overseas is increasingly a popular option for thousands of students. It does not necessitate any difficult procedures or fees. Admission to medical schools in other countries is a pretty straightforward procedure. MBBS abroad offers a plethora of chances to its students. The student must send the necessary paperwork to us, and we will begin the admissions process right away. The admission letter is issued once the following papers are submitted: Results of the 12th grade with eligibility matching according to the university. Passport photocopy Following the submission of the required papers, the student will get an invitation from the Ministry of Education of the particular nation. A representative is on hand at the airport to meet the students, and another is on hand at the destination airport to greet them, The University provides lodging for its students. The Cost of a Medical Degree in Abroad MBBS overseas offers a viable option for medical education studies. The cost of MBBS in Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, China, Bangladesh, Guyana, and other such nations is substantially lower than that of private medical institutions in India. Furthermore, the cost of living in these nations is quite low for international students. These colleges also provide scholarships to deserving students. Criteria for Eligibility to Study medical Abroad: The following admission requirements are reserved for Indian candidates seeking admission to MBBS programs at any of the Best Medical Universities in the World: Firtly, A non-reserved Indian medical candidate must have obtained a minimum of 50% in their 12th grade in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Secondly, Medical aspirants from the restricted categories (SC/ST/OBC) can apply with a minimum of 40% marks in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, according to NMC/MCI criteria (Medical Council of India). Medical students must take the NEET (National Eligibility and Entrance Test) starting in 2019.
twinkle instituteab
When a student asked Linus Pauling how he got a good idea, the double Nobel Prize winner answered: 'You have a lot of ideas and you throw away the bad ones.' Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, said that 'theorists in biology should realize that it is ... unlikely that they will produce a good theory at their first attempt. It is amateurs who have one big bright idea beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.
Robert Aunger (The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think)
The personal dark side rises up in meditation to torment and tempt the practitioner. It is the personal "Devil," the private hell, which must be confronted and transformed when it blocks the path of the esoteric student. The biological, cosmological, and cultural dark sides are the foundation of the personal experience of evil; in the end, however, individual practitioners struggling with the Work must face, by themselves, their own darkness.
William Carl Eichman
The Alvarez hypothesis did much to focus paleontological thinking on mass extinction, while further impetus came from another project that took shape about the same time. When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, my friend and fellow student Jack Sepkoski started to tabulate fossil diversity through time. Jack wasn’t the first to try this, but his perseverance and attention to detail enabled him to put together a remarkable database of the first and last appearances of every order, family and, eventually, genus of marine animals found in the fossil record. (Jack stayed away from tabulating species, correctly intuiting that the record at that level of detail would be prone to biases related to sediment abundance and the habits of collectors.) Jack’s data showed that the course of biological diversification never did run smooth.
Andrew H. Knoll (A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters)
If you are right, then everything we learned before and all the books we have, are wrong", said my students of biology in a class on academic writing, with expressions of trauma at what I was telling them. "But we use the same books as the students in the United States" they continued, trying to stop themselves from seeing the obvious truth. Because for those who have lived an entire life as a lie, the truth is indeed traumatic. You need a very high level of sanity to confront it, which is why I find it to be a funny coincidence when the crazy ones tell you that you are crazy for seeing the truth that they themselves are too afraid to analyze. They don't want to analyze it because, well, they may realize that the truth is true. They can't deal with such outcome. They would rather see you dead first.
Dan Desmarques
Nitric Oxide and Peroxynitrite in Health and Disease”40 that has nearly 1,500 references and can be reviewed at no charge by typing the title into your favorite search engine. This paper was written by three leading scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is a 140-page, landmark comprehensive review documenting how elevated levels of peroxynitrite cause extensive cellular damage that disrupts at least 97 critical biological processes and, as a result, are associated with more than 60 chronic diseases. The beginning of this article is a must read for any serious student of EMFs. NONIONIZING RADIATION ALSO DAMAGES YOUR DNA As I explained in Chapter 1, it is widely accepted that ionizing radiation—like X-rays and gamma rays—damages your body and greatly increases your risk of cancer. This is because ionizing radiation has short wavelengths and high
Joseph Mercola (EMF*D: 5G, Wi-Fi & Cell Phones: Hidden Harms and How to Protect Yourself)
정품몸짱약판매합니다.... 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:kpp44[☎?카톡↔kap6] 정품구입문의하는곳~☎위커메신저:PP444☎라인:PPPK44↔☎텔레:kpp44[☎?카톡↔kap6] Steroid Steroid Science Diction A compound having a unique chemical structure called steroid nuclei, such as gallbladder nectaric acid, heart venom, sex hormones, vitamin B, adrenal exfoliation hormones, etc. But usually referred to as steroids, it refers to the adrenal glands of the cortisone system, or hormone drugs that have a sugary metabolism and at the same time anti-inflammatory, anti-alerative action, and are widely used in medical care. foreign language notation steroid (English) Steroid Nursing Dictionary It is the generic name of a group of compounds having steroid nuclei, one of the most widely present ingredients as natural substances, such as sterols, bile acids, sex hormones, adrenal cortex hormones, ganglion and insect metamorphosis hormones. foreign language notation steroid, steroid(German) Steroid Oceanographic Dictionary The total designation of a family of compounds with nuclei of cyclopentanoperhyd-rophenanthrene. It performs biologically important functions such as sterols, bile acids, sex hormones, adrenal cortex hormones, and insect metamorphosis hormones. foreign language notation steroid (English) Steroid Nutrition Dictionary The total designation of compounds having cyclopentanophenanthrene rings as common mother nuclei. It includes bile acid, steroid hormones, strong-seam dividend payers, steroid saponin, alkaloids and insect metamorphic hormones. foreign language notation steroid (English) reference sterol steroid hairdressing dictionary A large series of non-binary lipids with complex four ring bones. Foreign Language notation Stereoid (English) [Naver Knowledge Encyclopedia] Steroids (Science Dictionary, 2010..414, Newton Editing, Hyun Chun-soo) Busan's Haeundae High School, whose designation as an autonomous private high school was canceled, will retain its self-employed status for the time being due to the court's decision. The permit haeundaego donghae, the academy is completely unjust to the disposition of revocation of administrative litigation will be well and truly over a specified as long as it criticizes independent status is maintained. Pusan District Court in administration has 28 haeundaego study corporate donghae ‘ choose them over effective disposition of revocation of suspension given an injunction filed by the Pusan Metropolitan Office of Education.(suspension of execution) for quoting ’ said. The court said as he “to institute donghae be deemed difficult to prevent damage to the urgent needs to recover.” according to the court's ruling the other hand, due to suspension of execution.A significant impact on public welfare may apply for an injunction referred to and have no data to " admit that there is to explain why. The court's ruling did not determine whether the Busan Metropolitan Office of Education's administrative disposition itself was legitimate. The court considered whether it was necessary to suspend the validity or execution of administrative proceedings, and acknowledged the need. Administrative measure of legal academy is donghae is decided by an administrative litigation filed through the Pusan Metropolitan Office of Education. As the administrative litigation is expected to continue until early next year, Haeundae is expected to maintain its self-employed status next year. Hwang Yoon-sung, the head of the emergency committee of Haeundae High School, said, "We expected that the cancellation of the Busan education office's self-assessment of the self-assessment of the self-administration system will be cited for the suspension of the application as it is currently in the middle of recruiting freshmen from Haeundae High School, so that there will be no problem in recruiting new students.
스테로이드판매,[☎?카톡↔kap6],스테로이드구입,클렌부테롤구입,클렌부테롤판매,아나바구입,아나바판매,디볼구입,비볼판매,메디택위니구입,울트라셋구입,
I do regard modern universities to be biologically toxic environments for healthy students.
Steven Magee
Jasleen Patel gave her a scowl for doubting her expertise. Jazz had completed her master’s degree in marine biology two years before and was finalizing her doctoral dissertation under Phoebe’s mentorship. Jazz had been one of Phoebe’s undergrad students and eventually her teaching assistant at Caltech’s marine lab. Since then, they had been working collaboratively for more than five years. So much so that Phoebe and Jazz became known as PB&J by most of their colleagues
James Rollins (Tides of Fire (Sigma Force #17))
For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far: Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts. Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.
Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
Then one day in biology class the students were dissecting frogs and the teacher, Mrs. Joan Thomas, watched him and said, “Kermit, you’re doing an excellent job.” He was terribly embarrassed and he was sure that she was making fun of him. All the other kids began to laugh too, sure that she was mocking him. After all, Kermit was the boy who had never been praised before and who was often the butt of a teacher’s frustrated criticism. “No,” she corrected them, “I mean it. Kermit is doing an excellent job.” That was the first time that anyone had ever told him that he was good at anything in his entire life. With that he began to feel confident in biology and he began to study and get good marks. Soon he had good marks in biology and poor marks in everything else. Then Mrs. Thomas became his homeroom teacher and she looked at his report card and told him that he ought to try to do better in other courses too. “You know, Kermit,” she said, “you’re intelligent and you could get good marks if you wanted to.” He was stunned by that, by the idea that she thought he was intelligent. In his last year at Calvin Coolidge he made the honor roll. He was very proud of that.
David Halberstam (The Breaks of the Game)
—Students are being required in some schools and universities to use biometric id employing rfid for electronic monitoring.
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare)
Our immune system does not exist in isolation from daily experience. For example, the immune defences that normally function in healthy young people have been shown to be suppressed in medical students under the pressure of final examinations. Of even greater implication for their future health and well-being, the loneliest students suffered the greatest negative impact on their immune systems. Loneliness has been similarly associated with diminished immune activity in a group of psychiatric inpatients. Even if no further research evidence existed—though there is plenty—one would have to consider the long-term effects of chronic stress. The pressure of examinations is obvious and short term, but many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. Many of us live, if not alone, then in emotionally inadequate relationships that do not recognize or honour our deepest needs. Isolation and stress affect many who may believe their lives are quite satisfactory. How may stress be transmuted into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence—and are influenced by—the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body’s physical states. When emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body’s defences against illness. Repression—dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm—disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
Swami Devi Dyal College Of Nursing Swami Devi Dyal College of Nursing was established in year 2006. The college is approved & recognized by Haryana Nursing Registration Council (HNRC), Indian Nursing Council (INC), New Delhi and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. SWATCH BHARAT B.Sc Nursing Students of Swami Devi Dyal college of nursing organized awareness programme on SWATCH BHARAT along with Nursing Staff of General Hospital Sector -6 Panchkula Haryana. They delivered health education to patients and their relatives about the importance of cleanliness and proper disposal of refuse .Posters were displayed. Courses Offered Bachelor of Science Nursing (Co-education) Program Mode Regular Duration 4 Years No. of Seats 60 Eligibility 1) The applicant must have passed 10+2 exam of board of school education Haryana or any examination recognized as equivalent there to with Science (Physics, Chemistry, & Biology) and English (PCBE) with minimum 45% in aggregate marks (40% marks for the reserved category SC/ST). 2) Minimum Age limit: 17 years before 31st December of the admission session 2012. 3) Candidate must be medically fit and medical fitness certificate shall have to be produced at the time of admission. Fee Structure 60000/- Admission Procedure The admission to B. Sc Nursing Program will be made on the basis of the CET test conducted by Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. The management Quota seats (25% of the sanctioned intake including 15% seats for children/ward of NRI’s) for Nursing will be filled as per 1. CET-2012 merit ranking Conducted by Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. 2. Merit based on percentage of marks in 10+2 in Physics, Chemistry, Biology & English.
swamidevidyal
Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Pharmacy The Institute is approved by AICTE & Pharmacy Council of India and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak. Courses Offered: Bachelor in Pharmacy A Bachelor of Pharmacy (Abbreviated B Pharma) is a graduate education degree in the field of pharmacy. The degree is the basic condition for practicing in many countries as a pharmacist and it is about developing necessary skills for counseling patients about understanding and using the properties of medicines. Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) is an undergraduate degree course in the field of Pharmacy education. The students those are interested in the medical field (except to become a doctor) can choose this course after the completion of class 12th. After the completion of this degree, the students can practice as a Pharmacist. Pharmacists can work in a range of industries related to the prescription, manufacture & provision of medicines. The duration of this course is 4 years. The B.Pharm is one of the popular job oriented course among the science students after class 12th. In this course the students study about the drugs and medicines, Pharmaceutical Engineering, Medicinal Chemistry etc. This course provides a large no. of job opportunities in both the public and private sector. There are various career options available for the science students after the completion of B.Pharm degree. The students can go for higher studies in the Pharmacy i.e. Master of Pharmacy (M.Pharm). This field is one of the evergreen fields in the medical sector, with the increasing demand of Pharma professional every year. B.Pharm programme covers the syllabus including biochemical science & health care. The Pharmacy Courses are approved by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) & Pharmacy Council of India (PCI). B.Pharma – Bachelor in Pharmacy Program Mode Regular Duration 4 Years No. of Seats 60 Eligibility Passed 10+2 examination with Physics and Chemistry as compulsory subjects along with any one of the Mathematics/ Biotechnology/ Biology. Obtained at least 47% marks in the above subjects taken together. Lateral Entry to Second Year: Candidate must have passed Diploma in Pharmacy course of a minimum duration of 2 years or more from Haryana Board of Technical Education or its equivalent with at least 50% marks in aggregate of all semesters/ years.
swamidevidyal
Or think about an elementary-school teacher. She knows her goal: to teach the material mandated by the state curriculum committee. She knows her audience: third graders with a range of knowledge and skills. She knows how to speak effectively—she’s a virtuoso of posture and diction and eye contact. So the goal is clear, the audience is clear, and the format is clear. But the design of the message itself is far from clear. The biology students need to understand mitosis—okay, now what? There are an infinite number of ways to teach mitosis. Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance?
Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
After World War II, physicist Richard Feynman was asked to serve on the State Curriculum Commission, to choose high school science textbooks for California. To his consternation, the texts appeared to leave students more confused than enlightened. Each book he examined was worse than the one prior. Finally, he came upon a promising beginning: a series of pictures, of a windup toy, an automobile, and a boy on a bicycle. Under each was a question: “What makes it go?” At last, he thought, something that was going to explain the basic science, starting with the fundamentals of mechanics (the toy), chemistry (the car), and biology (the boy). Alas, his elation was short lived. Where he thought to finally see explanation, real understanding, he found instead four words: “Energy makes it go.” But what was that? Why did it make it go? How did it make it go? These questions weren’t ever acknowledged, never mind answered. As Feynman put it, “That doesn’t mean anything. . . . It’s just a word!” Instead, he argued, “What they should have done is to look at the windup toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind ‘energy.’ Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
Maria Konnikova (Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes)
were a purely biological matter.” He relates also how a nurse at the George Washington Hospital attempted to excite him by detailing the characteristics she desired her lovers to have. He draws a disapproving picture of the American woman’s seductive appearance (“thirsty lips…bulging breasts…smooth legs…”) and flirtatious demeanour (“the calling eye…the provocative laugh…”). He castigates Arab mission students who gave in to these wiles and dated American girls.35 Although Qutb meant his sharply
John Calvert (Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism)
sidebars, you will know you’re getting the same insight and knowledge that classroom students receive in person. Look for these as well as references to the Real World and MCAT expertise callouts throughout the book. HIGH-YIELD MCAT REVIEW Following the content sction, you will find a High-Yield Questions section. These questions
Kaplan Test Prep (Kaplan MCAT Biology Review)
Our title as mother isn't defined, by biology or science. It can't be measured in centimeters or the arc of a curve. Mothering is the thing all women do, with the small and big kids under our care, the neighbor boys up the street, our students, our grown nieces, the children we can only hold in our hearts, , and the ones we don't even know yet to hope for. What I'm trying to say is that none of us is off the hook here. Humanity is crying out to be nurtured.
Shannan Martin (The Ministry of Ordinary Places: Waking Up to God's Goodness Around You)
But her first instincts had been right. He was a good husband, a wonderful father and stepfather. He brought her a cup of tea in bed every morning and rubbed her feet at night when she was tired. And they’d made beautiful children together, she thought fondly, as she put Jacob’s breakfast on the high chair in front of him. Both their sons were a perfect blend of the two of them, with ruddy chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Only Emily looked like she didn’t belong. She was growing more like her biological father with every passing year. As she stirred the lumps out of Jacob’s cereal, Maddie felt an unexpected rush of tears. She blinked them back, cursing the pregnancy hormones that left her so vulnerable. Emily’s father, Benjamin, had been her first boyfriend, a veterinary student in his final year at the same college as she when they’d met. Quiet and painfully shy, Maddie had always found it hard to make friends, having been raised by a widowed mother too busy with her charitable causes to have time to show Maddie how to have fun. At twenty-one, she’d never even been on a date until Benjamin asked her to join him at a lecture about animal husbandry. Somehow, Benjamin had got under her skin. Theirs had been a gentle, low-key relationship, a slow burn born of shared interests and companionship. It wasn’t love, exactly, but it was warm and reassuring and safe. Eight months after they’d met, she’d lost her virginity to him in an encounter that, like the relationship itself, was unremarkable but quietly satisfying. The pregnancy a year later had been a complete accident. To her surprise, Benjamin had been thrilled. They’d both graduated college by then, and while she made next to nothing at the sanctuary, he was earning enough as a small animal vet to look after them both. He bought dozens of books on fatherhood and had picked out names – Emily for a girl, Charlie for a boy – before Maddie had been for her first scan. He was so excited about becoming a
T.J. Stimson (A Mother’s Secret)