The Birth of Science and Reason (PDF file format—requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
Investigating the Magic Hooey Stick Modern Science and the Scientific Method are an expression of man's interest in trying to better understand nature without invoking supernatural causation. Looking to the empirical patterns of nature to determine naturalistic cause and effect, science sees nature as comprehensible and willing to yield its secrets. Investigating the Magic Hooey Stick allows students to test their own skepticism, empiricism and logic (the real scientific method) as they struggle to explain a teacher's claimed and demonstrated psychic powers.
Questions for discussion or short essays:
Students will find these exercises akin to a pre-test, largely evaluating one's understanding either based on prior knowledge or on the brief presentation in the Prologue. They are therefore meant to provoke critical thinking. Much more information regarding each of these questions will be developed in greater detail in the principal epochs of this Web site.
1. Is Neanderthal Man classified as an australopithecine or Homo erectus, or perhaps even Homo sapiens? Explain.
2. Why does it seem likely that the gracile australopithecines developed intelligence faster than the robust australopithecines?
3. Is the process of natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, still at work in modern humans? Why or why not?
4. Why do researchers think that the primates developed binocular vision and manual dexterity when most animals did not?
5. Summarize the evidence that some autralophithecines used primitive tools as long ago as a million years.
6. Explain why it's wrong to state that humans have evolved from apes.
7. How any of the following factors likely increased the rate of evolution during the past 100,000 years? Continental drift, volcanic activity, climatic change, invention of tools. Explain.
8. At least two modern human characteristics we now greatly value preceded (and were probably chiefly responsible for) the rapid rise in cranial capacity of our ancestors during the past few million years. Name and describe these characteristics.
9. Some neurobiologists argue that while the origin of life is rather probable given the right conditions, the origin of intelligence might not be. What is the basis of their reasoning?
10. Why does the fact that the neurons are not "hard-wired" (i.e., physically connected) make the brain even more versatile than if they were?
11. Explain why brain-to-body ratios are probably better indicators of intelligence than total brain mass alone.
12. What prevents a single cell from growing to enormous size and eventually developing intelligence?