An Ugly Little Secret Charles Darwin had a very dark secret, one made all the darker because he was a moneyed gentleman of polite society, a man of scientific leisure, and one with ties to England’s governmental, religious, financial and academic elite. That is to say, he was someone with a significant reputation at stake,…
One of the world’s leading experts in the neurobiology of emotion, Dr. LeDoux has garnered many accolades for his basic research into how the brain processes fear. Using clever conditioning experiments, he and his colleagues have been able to show that a small almond sized brain structure called the amygdala is responsible for processing fear…
Clever Hans As the story is told, sometime late in the first decade of the twentieth century, a retired German mathematics teacher named Wilhelm von Osten discovered an odd thing about his horse. He had reason to believe that this particular animal, whose name was Hans, was capable of amazing, human-like powers of intellect. Von…
The irony of the theory of evolution is that evolution’s spectacular success in creating complex biological systems was historically the reason that this theory was so difficult to accept. It is difficult to imagine how a random sequence of miscues, of genetic mutations, could be the source of such complexity. Charles Darwin acknowledged the difficulty…
What is the link between language and learning? While exploring these issues, fundamental questions arise that have far-reaching effects for the classroom and beyond. The most fundamental mechanism by which humans share information is language, but does language fall into the category of biologically evolved function or cultural invention? If it is, at least in…
