“Critical Thinking” against Evolution.

When I was in elementary school, I remember being told the importance of critical thinking. The questions posed under the “critical thinking” guise were always more difficult and took more time, but they allowed for a greater range of creative answers than a normal academic question. This was the purpose of critical thinking.

It seems that Louisiana, with the passage of the “Academic Freedom” bill, wants to redefine the word to serve a Christian agenda.

One fish, two fish…

Fish probably aren’t the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of mathematics, but, amazingly, new research suggests that fish may be able to count… at least, to four.

Human Language Ability: Intrinsic or Acquired?

By Chris, Crispy Quips Administrator http://crispyquips.wordpress.com

Note: this is a paper I wrote for a Linguistics course at UC Davis. It is presented here in its entirety.

Human Language Ability:

Intrinsic or Acquired?

Christopher Graham

University of California, Davis

INTRODUCTION

There exists an amazing amount of debate concerning how humans acquire language. Indeed, all humans seem to have the ability to use language. It has been said that “the faculty mediating human communication appears remarkably different from that of other living creatures” (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002, p. 2), and yet, at some level, we are ourselves examples of what we see around us: naturally-occurring creatures. It is true that other animals may indeed communicate, but animal languages “lack the rich expressive and open-minded power of human language” (Hauser et al., 2002, 
p. 3).

This begs the question: how is it that humans have developed such a unique system of language? Or, perhaps more importantly, how is it that humans acquire that language? Is language learned, or is there some innate evolutionary structure that dictates its development?

Water Defies Gravity?

…Ok, maybe not for any great distance. But still, it’s amazing to think that scientists still know so little about H₂0 that something like this could have gone unknown for human history.

What is this amazing feat of water? Will you be blown away by its sheer fantasticalness? See for yourself.