Gas Law for the Classroom

The author provides information on how science teachers can write science literacy objectives that help English language learners (ELLs) develop the scientific literacy needed for academic success in the science classroom. The article offers suggestions on how teachers can determine the vocabulary, language functions, and sentence structures that their students need to engage in critical thinking in science. An approach for collaboration with students' English as a second language (ESL) teacher is discussed.     

Checks and balances: the welcomed tension between philosophy and science

There is a tension between science and philosophy, but this tension need not engender enmity or derision. Scientists and philosophers can work together, and we argue that working together is beneficial to both, even if it is sometimes uncomfortable. We offer examples of how philosophy can autonomously and effectively inform scientific practice. Science and philosophy share certain methodological concerns and practices; therefore, scientists who disregard philosophy are vulnerable to critical conceptual mistakes. If our arguments are correct, and if it can also be shown that science informs philosophy, then, while it is possible for both disciplines to operate autonomously, each should welcome the checks and balances that each provides for one another in the investigation and explanation of reality.     

Definition of the real domain of the history of sciences and exploring the relationship with the philosophy of science

The specific field of the history of science is the study and explanation of the origin and transformation of the structures of scientific knowledge. The historian of science should render understandable the reality of scientific research. The relationships between the history of science and the philosophy of science are examined stating that (1) the philosophical theories on the development of science have a scientific content only as much as they may be compared with the results of the history of science, and (2) the philosophy of science does not refer to an immediate historical reality but to an intellectual reconstruction of the past.     

On Supporting Children's Initiative

The simple distinction between negative and positive emotions does not add very much to the understanding of the nature of human emotions. One type of pleasure is not similar to another. One type of pain is not comparable with another experience of suffering. It has to be taken into account that emotions, as evaluative processes of different types, are mostly automatic. In the case of humans, however, emotions are also partly based on deliberative thinking and reflection. Purely affective reactions arise as a consequence of subcortical mechanisms. This means that some emotions are automatic and based on uncontrolled, and even unconscious premises. On the other hand, evaluation can be due to reflective judgments, based on concepts that allow an understanding of what is positive or negative in reality. This understanding is not only from one's own point of view but also from a general point of view. Moreover, it is an understanding not only related to the present but also to the past or future (anticipated) reality. In this type of specifically human emotions, affects are provoked as a consequence of deliberative appraisals. The author postulates the categorization of the negative and the positive emotions, referring to different automatic and reflective sources. These sources are: (1) affective (homeostatic and hedonic)—leading to automatic emotions, and conceptual (concepts of the ideal self and abstract axiological concepts of good and evil)—leading to reflective emotions.     

The Difference in Cognition Consistency Between the Sciences and Humanities

It is reasonable that the strict sciences represented by mathematics, physics and chemistry have nearly been a kind of substitutional belief of humans after "the Death of God". To conclude theoretically, the significant attraction or the extremely great power of science is, in a word, the validity of thinking and action. From the viewpoint of human action or prac-     

The evolutionary origins of tensed language and belief

I outline the debate in metaphysics between those who believe time is tensed and those who believe it is tenseless. I describe the terms in which this debate has been carried out, and the significance to it of ordinary tensed language and widespread common sense beliefs that time is tensed. I then outline a case for thinking that our intuitive beliefs about tense constitute an Adaptive Imaginary Representation (Wilson, in Biol Philos 5:37–62, 1990; Wilson, in Biol Philos 10:77–97, 1995). I also outline a case for thinking that our ordinary tensed beliefs and tensed language owe their tensed nature to its being adaptive to adopt a temporally self-locating perspective on reality. If these conclusions are right, then common sense intuitions and temporal language will be utterly misleading guides to the nature of temporal reality.     

Models in palaeontological functional analysis

Models are a principal tool of modern science. By definition, and in practice, models are not literal representations of reality but provide simplifications or substitutes of the events, scenarios or behaviours that are being studied or predicted. All models make assumptions, and palaeontological models in particular require additional assumptions to study unobservable events in deep time. In the case of functional analysis, the degree of missing data associated with reconstructing musculoskeletal anatomy and neuronal control in extinct organisms has, in the eyes of some scientists, rendered detailed functional analysis of fossils intractable. Such a prognosis may indeed be realized if palaeontologists attempt to recreate elaborate biomechanical models based on missing data and loosely justified assumptions. Yet multiple enabling methodologies and techniques now exist: tools for bracketing boundaries of reality; more rigorous consideration of soft tissues and missing data and methods drawing on physical principles that all organisms must adhere to. As with many aspects of science, the utility of such biomechanical models depends on the questions they seek to address, and the accuracy and validity of the models themselves.     

From code to speaker meaning

This paper has two aims. One is to defend an incrementalist view of the evolution of language, not from those who think that syntax could not evolve incrementally, but from those who defend a fundamental distinction between Gricean communication or ostensive inferential communication (Scott-Phillips, Sperber, Tomasello, originally based on Grice) and code-based communication. The paper argues against this dichotomy, and sketches ways in which a code-based system could evolve into Gricean communication. The second is to assess the merits of the Sender–Receiver Framework, originally formulated by David Lewis, and much elaborated and set into an evolutionary context by Brian Skyrms and colleagues, as a framework for thinking about the evolution of language. Despite the great strengths of that framework, and despite the great value of a framework that is both general and formally tractable, I argue that there are critical features of language that it fails to capture .     

Thinking about evolution: combinatorial play as a strategy for exercising scientific creativity

An enduring focus in education on how scientists formulate experiments and ‘do science’ in the laboratory has excluded a vital element of scientific practice: the creative and imaginative thinking that generates models and testable hypotheses. In this case study, final‐year biomedical sciences university students were invited to create and justify a taxonomy of selected vertebrates on the basis of their brain organisation, as part of an exercise exploring the evolution of embryonic development. While raising a number of issues surrounding the context and methods of comparative zoology, this exercise also invoked a set of cognitive processes that can neither be adequately characterised as role‐play nor critical thinking. By contrast, the act of formulating and justifying taxonomy identifies a style of creative thought that is a prerequisite for hypothesis formation. A defining characteristic of this exercise is that it engages activities that are independent of disciplinary perspective. This flexibility in approach may provide a route through to defining what qualifies as a creative teaching exercise in science.     

Punctuationism,cladistics and the legacy of medieval neoplatonism

The current dominant orthoxy in paleoanthropology has adopted the stance of cladistics and/or punctuationism and abandonned any concern for the mechanics by which selection has operated to control the course of human evolution. Rather than being a «new» intellectual development, this is simply the most recent manifestation of a tradition of thinking that goes back via Linnaeus to medieval scholasticism where reality was assumed to consist of discrete entities that can be dealt with solely by the exercis of deductive logic. While the construction of cladograms serves the useful function of proposing testable hypotheses, the promotion of cladistic logic as the only valid approach represents a great leap backwards into medieval intellectual stagnation. If an inductive component is not restored to paleoanthropology, it will cease to maintain its credibility as a productive science.     

"Noise" as a unifying concept in the theory of schizophrenia

The psychological effects of pharmacologically active substances can only be adequately described in terms of the psychological processes upon which they act. Psychopharmacology therefore depends on the development of psychological “models”, i.e. formally stated and testable hypotheses concerning the psychological processes required for the performance of any given task. Information theory is not concerned with the physical nature of events but only with those features which confer specificity upon them. It therefore provides a suitable theoretical language in which to describe interactions between biochemical, neurophysiological and psychological events. (i) The first section of this paper defines the information-theory concept of noise. Starting from first principles with the “noisy channel” and progressing to the “noisy system”, some of its psychophysiological implications are explored. (ii) An “order-memory” task is described which was used for three years to study the thinking of acutely disturbed young adult psychiatric patients, including many with acute schizophrenia. On the basis of a simple model, it is possible to calculate the value of a “critical” noise-level which marks the dividing line between two qualitatively different modes of functioning. (iii) A number of results are either reported or summarized, which show the functional significance of a supra-critical noise-level and its connection with the acute schizophrenic state. (iv) A “control-theory” approach to schizophrenia is outlined, which shows how specific and non-specific hereditary factors could be accommodated in the hypothesis but mainly emphasizes the concept of a mutual struggle for control between parent and child, in which the “loser” overloads the regulatory capacity of the other by “going noisy”. In this way the “loser” escapes from control but is more or less disabled by his own cognitive noise.     

The practical modelling of context-dependent causal processes--a recasting of Robert Rosen's thought

This paper is a critical recasting of some of Robert Rosen's thought. It is argued that a lot of the thrust of Rosen's work can be better understood when recast in terms of the context dependency of causal models. When recast in this way, I seek to highlight how his thought does not lead to the abandonment of formal modelling and a descent into relativism, but a more careful and rigours science of complex systems. This also sheds light on several aspects of modelling, including the need for multiple models, the nature of modelling noise, and why adaptive systems cause particular problems to modellers. In this way, I hope to decrease researchers fear that, by taking Rosen's criticisms seriously, they would have to abandon the realm of acceptable science.     

Genetic biasing through cultural transmission: Do simple Bayesian models of language evolution generalise?

The recent Bayesian approaches to language evolution and change seem to suggest that genetic biases can impact on the characteristics of language, but, at the same time, that its cultural transmission can partially free it from these same genetic constraints. One of the current debates centres on the striking differences between sampling and a posteriori maximising Bayesian learners, with the first converging on the prior bias while the latter allows a certain freedom to language evolution. The present paper shows that this difference disappears if populations more complex than a single teacher and a single learner are considered, with the resulting behaviours more similar to the sampler. This suggests that generalisations based on the language produced by Bayesian agents in such homogeneous single agent chains are not warranted. It is not clear which of the assumptions in such models are responsible, but these findings seem to support the rising concerns on the validity of the “acquisitionist” assumption, whereby the locus of language change and evolution is taken to be the first language acquirers (children) as opposed to the competent language users (the adults).     

Field biology, food web models, and management: challenges of context and scale

Managers are increasingly aware of the need for science to inform the stewardship of natural lands and resources. If ecologists are to address this need, we must increase the scope of our inferences, while maintaining sufficient resolution and realism to predict trajectories of specific populations or ecosystem variables. Food chain and simple food web models, used either as core or component hypotheses, can help us to meet this challenge. The simple mass balance logic of dynamic food chain or food web models can organize our thinking about a range of applied problems, such as evaluating controls over populations of concern, or of biotic assemblages that affect important ecosystem properties. In other applications, a food chain or web may be incorporated as one element in models of regional mass balances affecting resources or environments. Specific predictions of food web models will often fail because of inadequate resolution (e.g., of functionally significant differences among taxa within "trophic levels") or insufficient scope (e.g., of spatio-temporal variation over scales relevant to management). Increasing use of tracers to delimit spatial scales of food web interactions will reduce, but not eliminate, this limitation. If used with skepticism and vigilance to local natural history, however, food chain or simple food web models can promote the iterative feedback between prediction, falsification by observation, and new prediction central to hypothetico-deductive science and adaptive management. Experience argues that this stepwise path is the fastest towards better understanding and control of our impacts on nature.     

The rise of research on futures in ecology: rebalancing scenarios and predictions

Concern about the ecological consequences of global change has increasingly stimulated ecologists to examine the futures of ecological systems. Studying futures is not only a crucial element of the interaction between science, management and decision making , but also a critical research challenge per se , especially because futures cannot be observed or experimented on. In addition, researchers can encounter methodological and theoretical difficulties, which make interpretations and predictions problematic. In the literature which deals with futures of ecological systems two main lines of research can be distinguished: a predictive approach, which dominates the literature, can be contrasted with a rarer number of studies that elaborate potential scenarios for ecological systems. Scenario approaches currently concern mainly contacts with stakeholders or decision makers, or the use of climate scenarios to derive projections about ecological futures. We argue that a new direction for ecological futures research could be explored by using ecological scenarios in combination with predictive models to further fundamental ecological research, in addition to enhancing its applied value.     

Comparing the effects of art education and science education on creative thinking in high school students

What is the link between art and creativity? The purpose of this study was to determine the role of art education in creative thinking. A causal-comparative research design was used. Arts and science high school students (N = 162) participated. Results showed that creative thinking in visual arts students in Grade 10 with high scores differed significantly from that in music and science students; however, this difference was not found among students in Grade 11. A main reason for this result in Grade 10 students might be the non-routine problem-solving process in visual arts education, in which artwork production is an important component in creative thinking development. Considering this result, it was concluded that the effect of different education disciplines—called education department effect—on creative thinking can be significant.     

Models and Myths of Science: Views of the Elephant

I discuss selected philosophies of science in terms of the roleof rationalism in science and the reality status of the productsof scientific reasoning. A model is then presented in whichI argue that creativity in science involves the mental manipulationof images which are later compared to the shared empirical experienceof the scientific community. The assimilation of a scientificconcept involves a re-creation of the concept through a similarmanipulation of images and empirical experience. The processof recreation can distort the original concept. The result ofthis process of creation and recreation is neither an objectivediscovery of truth nor a subjective invention of truth but aninteractive reality composed of the inquiring human mind andan objectively unknowable nature. Since the model or myth ofscience we accept influences many aspects of the science-societyinteraction, the model I present here as well as models presentedby others ought to be carefully evaluated through the studyof the history of science.     

Teaching evolution (and all of biology) more effectively: Strategies for engagement, critical reasoning, and confronting misconceptions

The strength of the evidence supporting evolution has increased markedly since the discovery of DNA but, paradoxically, public resistance to accepting evolution seems to have become stronger. A key dilemma is that science faculty have often continued to teach evolution ineffectively, even as the evidence that traditional ways of teaching are inferior has become stronger and stronger. Three pedagogical strategies that together can make a large difference in students' understanding and acceptance of evolution are extensive use of interactive engagement, a focus on critical thinking in science (especially on comparisons and explicit criteria) and using both of these in helping the students actively compare their initial conceptions (and publicly popular misconceptions) with more fully scientific conceptions. The conclusion that students' misconceptions must be dealt with systematically can be difficult for faculty who are teaching evolution since much of the students' resistance is framed in religious terms and one might be reluctant to address religious ideas in class. Applications to teaching evolution are illustrated with examples that address criteria and critical thinking, standard geology versus flood geology, evolutionary developmental biology versus organs of extreme perfection, and the importance of using humans as a central example. It is also helpful to bridge the false dichotomy, seen by many students, between atheistic evolution versus religious creationism. These applications are developed in detail and are intended to be sufficient to allow others to use these approaches in their teaching. Students and other faculty were quite supportive of these approaches as implemented in my classes.     

遗传学史在遗传学教学中的作用

科学史的研究和发展状况能反映一个国家的科学技术水平,遗传学史是生命科学发展史的一个重要分支,21世纪是生命科学的世纪,在遗传学教学中加强遗传学发展史的介绍,不仅具有教育功能,使学生了解遗传学的产生和发展,而且可以培养学生的思维能力和科学素质。本文就遗传学史的教育功能及在教学中的作用进行论述。