Garniss Curtis (1919–2012): Dating Our Past

Garniss Curtis (1919–2012): Dating Our Past

Around the time that On the Origin of Species was published, Lord Kelvin authoritatively stated that the Earth was between 20 and 400 million years old, a range still quoted today by many who deny evolution. As it was difficult to conceive of life’s diversity arising via natural selection and speciation in so short a span, the apparent young Earth formed a serious barrier to the plausibility of...

Dating the past with Radioactivity

Very soon after the discovery of radioactivity, measurements of the heavy radioactive elements existing in nature were undertaken to determine the age of rocks (Rutherford 1904), but only when Professor Willard Libby in an evening lecture during the first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in 1955 described how he and his research team had evolved the carb...

Honoring Our Past, Building Our Future.

Honouring our past and shaping our future.

One of my favourite things to do is to ask Canadians to tell the story of how they came to be in this country. Are your ancestors First Nations or Inuit or Metis, the original people of the land? Did your forebears come here for love? For money? To escape religious persecution? Did they come looking for a better future, not for themselves, but for their children? I was born in Winnipeg, Man, an...

Forgetting Our Personal Past

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker as within-individual retrieval-induced forgett...