Thinking and Practicing Like a Scientist?

Thinking like a scientist: innateness as a case study.

The concept of innateness appears in systematic research within cognitive science, but it also appears in less systematic modes of thought that long predate the scientific study of the mind. The present studies therefore explore the relationship between the properly scientific uses of this concept and its role in ordinary folk understanding. Studies 1-4 examined the judgments of people with no ...

Becoming a Successful Scientist: Strategic Thinking for Scientific Discovery

Although the idea of furthering one’s career has universal appeal, it can be quite difficult to determine the best way to fulfill our professional aspirations. In Becoming a Successful Scientist, Dr. Craig Loehle attempts to describe the mental tools required for an aspiring scientist. The bulk of the book is dedicated to problem-solving strategies and guidelines for scientific discovery, but b...

Thinking like a climate

Harold Varmus: Still behaving like a scientist

In January, Harold Varmus will begin the next stage in an unusual career. He’s gone from English literature to medicine to bench science to Washington science bureaucrat, and now he becomes the well-paid (some would say extremely well-paid) president of a private, not-for-profit treatment and research facility, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He’s succeeded in everything...

Thinking Like a Tree (and Other Forms of Ecological Thinking)

In the rain forests of Costa Rica, there is an unusual type of tree known as a “walking tree.” It is a strange looking tree. At the base of the tree is a tangle of roots, rising about a meter above the ground. It looks as if someone yanked the tree straight up out of the ground, leaving about a meter of its roots exposed above ground level. According to rain-forest guides, the walking tree actu...