Memory: It’s Not a Lie if You Believe It

You can't not believe everything you read.

Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Descartes (1644/1984) suggested that people can and should, whereas Spinoza (1677/1982) suggested that people should but cannot. Three experiments support the hypothesis that comprehension includes an initial belief in the information comprehended. Ss were exposed to false information about a criminal defendant (Experiments 1 and 2) or a ...

If You Own It, It Exists; If You Love It, That Says Something about You, Not It: Semantically Conditioned Case in Finnish

In Finnish, the object of a transitive verb is case marked in one of two ways: with the ACCUSATIVE or PARTITIVE case. Generally speaking, all Finnish transitive verbs are compatible with both accusative and partitive marked objects. Basically, which case is assigned can affect the interpretation assigned to a verb or its object. This suggests an instance of free variation in Finnish; that there...

Creation: Believe It or Not

Naturalism has replaced Christianity as the main religion of the Western world. Though the teaching that natural evolutionary processes can account of the origin of all living species has never been proven, that teaching is central to the philosophy that now dominates Western scholarly thinking. Even evangelicals have become less willing to defend the early chapters of Genesis against the encro...

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it".

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It

Start of the lab: 2006 Size of the lab: Currently ten—size has fluctuated between five and 20 Research field: Systems and synthetic biology In 2005, I was working in the bioinformatics group of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont. The company was downsizing its research and development effort. At the same time, synthetic biology was emerging as a new discipline, and I wanted t...