Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Serendip Visitor's picture

Babies and Culture

I have to say that I found the two articles on the babies both incredibly interesting. I love kids, I love babies, and I used to babysit a lot back in high school so I was able to relate some ideas from the articles to my babysitting days. I have to say that I've never really thought deeply on the concept of how babies think. I was so interested to read about how they actually analyze and come up with theories! I've never really thought babies were stupid, but I also never thought of them as being intelligent. Maybe it's because when I see a baby I'm mostly thinking, "aww what a cute baby!" rather than the level of their intelligence. So what do I think of babies now? I'm not quite sure and honestly I'm a little confused. I don't want to call them stupid, but then again I don't want to call them scientists either. I just think of babies and being babies. We have to be there for them to help them grow, learn, and be socially inclined. On another note: One thing I'm curious about is that, like nina stated in her post, one of the articles said that babies prefer faces of their own race. So what about racially mixed babies? Would they prefer the features of the two races that they are made of?

With Logicomix, sure, Bertrand Russell spent 10 years coming up with "Principia Mathematica" only to fail. Is this really a failure? For Bertrand Russell, yes. But it led the math world somewhere important. "Principia Mathematica" led to Kurt Godel's idea that "There will always be unanswered questions." Would Godel have come up with this concept without Principia? Well, no one really knows. All we know is that Principia and it's failure invented more ideas that helped shape the math world.

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
4 + 2 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.