John B. Watson Misrepresented
The following is a quote as it appears in Steven Pinker’s 1994 book The Language Instinct and in his 2002 book The Blank Slate:
“I should like to go one step further now and say, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
Here is the original quote, as it appears in Watson’s 1924 book Behaviorism:
“I should like to go one step further now and say, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. Please note that when this experiment is made I am to be allowed to specify the way the children are to be brought up and the type of world they have to live in.”
Vaccines and Autism
2008–03-10: Hannah Poling
Case Study: Autism and Vaccines
2009–02-25: Bailey Banks
Vaccines and Autism: The Unending Story
Nightline Face-Off: Does God Exist Part II
Martin Bashir: Kirk, in Victor Stenger’s book God: The Failed Hypothesis, he says, “Evolution, by natural selection, is accepted as an observed fact by the great majority of biologists and scientists in related fields and is utilized in every aspect of modern science, including medicine.”
How do you account for the fact that evolution is now the dominant philosophical understanding for so many of the sciences? Read the rest of this entry »
On the Source of Racial/Community-based Antagonism
“As the patient searchers discern more and more about early man and his predecessors, they also may gain an ever-widening insight about modern man, his nature, his failings and his future. Most major anthropologists reject the notion popularized by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) and others that man is inherently aggressive and that his murderous instincts derive from his apelike origins. Indeed, they have found no evidence in their digs that man was anything but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It was farming, they believe, that created settlers with property to protect and fostered cultural differences that led to antagonisms between races and communities.
Richard Leakey…notes that racial differences, as they are commonly perceived, are a superficial and recent development, having arisen only about 15,000 years ago.”
–Time Magazine article “Puzzling Out Man’s Ascent,” Monday, Nov. 07, 1977
Transplants
Matthew Scott
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Quote from Richard Feynman
I met Arlene’s father at the hospital. He had been there for a few days. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I have to go home.” He was so unhappy, he just left.
When I finally saw Arlene, she was very weak, and a bit fogged out. She didn’t seem to know what was happening. She stared straight ahead most of the time, looking around a little bit from time to time, and was trying to breathe. Every once in a while her breathing would stop—and she would sort of swallow— and then it would start again. It kept going like this for a few hours.
I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised that I wasn’t feeling what I thought people were supposed to feel under the circumstances. Maybe I was fooling myself. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.
It’s hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come—it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.
Quote from Carl Sagan
“Sagan desperately wants to find life someplace, anyplace—on Mars, on Titan, in the solar system or outside it,” one of his Viking colleagues said recently. “In all the divergent things he does, that is the unifying thread. I don’t know why, but if you read his papers or listen to his speeches, even though they are on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated topics, there is always the question ‘Is this or that phenomenon related to life?’ People say, ‘What a varied career he has had,’ but everything he has done has had this one underlying purpose.”
Sagan was asked the other day why he thought it was that he, and others, are so interested in trying to find life beyond the earth. “I think it’s because human beings love to be alive, and we have an emotional resonance with something else alive, rather than with a molybdenum atom,” he said. “Why are people interested in other animals? Why are we interested in the life history of the armadillo? Why do we go to Antarctica to find out what the emperor penguins have been doing lately? It’s fun, because we are primarily drawn to things that are alive.”
From a June 28, 1976 profile in The New Yorker by Henry S. F. Cooper titled “A Resonance With Something Alive”