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deconversionmovement:

Daniel Dennett’s Seven Tools for Thinking

Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett is one of America’s foremost thinkers. In this extract from his new book, he reveals some of the lessons life has taught him.

1 USE YOUR MISTAKES

We have all heard the forlorn refrain: “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say: “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking and reflect on it – on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place and then about what went wrong.

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(via theolduvaigorge)

unlikelyfriendshipsbook:

The Cat and the Sloth

deconversionmovement:

Fossils indicate common ancestor for two primate groups

Find suggests Old World monkeys and apes diverged 25 million years ago.

Palaeontologists working in Tanzania have discovered the oldest known fossils from two major primate groups — Old World monkeys, which include baboons and macaques, and apes, which include humans and chimpanzees. The study, published online today in Nature, reveals new information about primate evolution.

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(via alphacaeli)

theolduvaigorge:

Focusing on publication quality would benefit all researchers

• by Marco Pautasso

“The under-representation of women in academia is a shameful legacy of decades of bias,but is still partly caused by current thinking and actions [1–4]. Cameron et al. [5] argue that ‘publication quality and impact provide more equitable metrics of research performance and should be stressed above publication quantity.’ They support this claim by citing a study published in 2006 of the publication and citation rates of a cohort of 168 ecologists and evolutionary biologists who started to publish between 1990 and 1993 [6]. The study found that female researchers in that cohort tended to publish less than male researchers, but that their average number of citations per publication (a proxy for publication quality) tended to be higher than for male researchers, given a certain publication level (the number of citations per publication was found to be positively correlated with the number of publications) [6]. Do current data still show that stressing publication quality or impact rather than quantity would benefit the chances of female ecologists?

Data retrieved in November 2012 from approximately 1600 Google Scholar profiles (those of researchers who selected the research interest ‘ecology’ for their profile) showed a strong (r2 ~80%) positive correlation between the total number of citations and the total number of publications, for both female and male researchers, with no significant differences in either intercept or slope (Figure1A). The average number of citations per publication also increased with increasing number of publications, for both female and male researchers, with no significant differences in either intercept or slope (Figure 1B)” (read more/open access).

(Open access source: Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in press 2013; bottom image: UN News Centre)

anthropologica:

Ngbitimo y dos de sus esposas. Detrás de ellos se ven las medicinas que cultivan.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Brujería, magia y oráculos entre los azande

• Para hacerse amigo de Evans-Pritchard en Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/eeevanspritchard

(via anthropologica)

anthropologica:

Edmund Leach during fieldwork in the Kachin Hills of Northern Burma (credit: Louisa Brown)

• Para hacerse fan de Leach en Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/E.R.Leach

(via anthropologica)