Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emot The news of society's growing inequality makes all of us uneasy. But why? Dan Ariely reveals some new, surprising research on what we think is fair, as far as how wealth is distributed over societies In this prophetic talk -- just days before Dolly the sheep was stuffed -- biotech ethicist Gregory Stock looked forward to new, more meaningful and controversial technologies, like customizable babies, whose adoption might drive human evolution.
Hard work, resilience and grit lead to success, right? This narrative pervades the way we think, says economist Darrick Hamilton, but the truth is that our chances at economic security have less to do with what we do and more to do with the wealth position we're born into.
Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things plus a new theory from Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny. We need women to work, and we need working women to have babies.
So why is America one of the only countries in the world that offers no national paid leave to new working mothers? In this incisive talk, Jessica Shortall makes the impassioned case that the reality of new working motherhood in America is both hidden and horrible: millions of wome What do you think would happen if you invited an individual with mental health issues who had been homeless for many years to move directly from the street into housing?
Loyd Pendleton shares how he went from skeptic to believer in the Housing First approach to homelessness -- providing the displaced with short-term assistance to find permanent The public displays of affection that straight couples take for granted every day can be outright dangerous for queer couples to practice -- what do you do when simply holding hands with a loved one can be considered a political act?
Irish activist Panti Bliss shares what it's like to navigate such a world and highlights the importance of normal Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder can improve the lives of everyone affected, but the complex network of causes make it incredibly difficult to predict. At TEDxPeachtree, Ami Klin describes a new early detection method that uses eye-tracking technologies to gauge babies' social engagement skills and reliably measure their risk of devel The tool allows scientists to make precise edits to DNA strands, which could lead to treatments for genetic diseases Creating genetically modified people is no longer a science fiction fantasy; it's a likely future scenario.
Biologist Paul Knoepfler estimates that within fifteen years, scientists could use the gene editing technology CRISPR to make certain "upgrades" to human embryos -- from altering physical appearances to eliminating the risk of auto-immune What is jealousy?
What drives it, and why do we secretly love it? Once you identify the answer, why do you think is the case? From the "What do babies think? Tagged: early childhood development. New research methods reveal that babies and young children learn by rationally testing hypotheses, analyzing statistics and doing experiments much as scientists do. In a TED talk and essay Annie Murphy Paul says that through every encounter and circumstance of its mother, a fetus picks up significant clues about the outside world well before entering it And I think just the opposite is true.
Conventional wisdom would say that newborn babies and infants are relatively helpless. The babies were put into a room where they sat and watched a man tap a box on his head. What do babies think? When do babies start learning? I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we … Definitely one of the most prominent aspects of my talk was my use of logos.
Watch this Ted talk by Alison Gopnik to learn about how recent discoveries show us that babies are probably smarter than we think. Based on the TED Talk, are most of us able to identify the lies in children, even our own? This fabulous Ted Talk is a great and I admit far less tirade-like way of explaining some of how they are very much the opposite. We need women to work, and we need working women to have babies. More details about Gopnik's work are available in a TED talk she gave last year.
Alison Gopnik says our long childhoods give humans an evolutionary edge; babies get started learning right away and are smarter about it than we think. Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know.
However, strides in developmental psychology have changed this belief. Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli.
Laughter But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't. So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli — just like a baby and any other sane person. But half the time, what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, "Mmmmm, broccoli.
I tasted the broccoli. I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck. We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put her hand out and say, "Can you give me some? So the question is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli.
On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn't figure this out. But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like.
So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that we don't always want the same thing.
And what's more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted. Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old.
So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that's actually demonstrated it. The question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? And how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time?
I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they're worse than useless, because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive.
But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there's actually an answer. If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they're very, very good at pecking for grain, and they're not much good at doing anything else.
Well it turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot. There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning.
Well what kind of explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments. And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows.
We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal. We're smarter, we're more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species. My son is Laughter And at least until they're 23, we're still popping those worms into those little open mouths. All right, why would we see this correlation?
Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you're going to be helpless. So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, "A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better? And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor.
So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected. We don't have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world.
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