good evening like most of us my mind
wand
– time and I get random thoughts like
what would it be like to live in the
Stone Age
seriously I think about how
uncomfortable I’d be wearing skins and
how without central heating or air
conditioning I probably be cold and
clammy and hot and sweaty all the time
but seriously Stone Age people had to
work with the materials that they had at
hand if you take a walk in the forest
you realize what they had they had wood
that bark leaves berries twigs animals
and sex stuff like that but nothing else
and out of that they found strategies to
produce shelter provide food warmth and
protection so how did they do that well
maybe a better question I asked is how
do human beings just in general learn
things for the first time because that’s
what they had to do we think of
knowledge today and learning in terms of
what is conveyed to us somebody comes
and tells us what’s true and what
knowledge is and in the Stone Age they
had to figure it out for themselves it
was a lot more complicated process they
had to observe carefully they had to
create ideas and test those ideas and
that’s what I’m going to be talking
about today so it’s thought that modern
human beings evolved from a branch of
primates about 200,000 years ago but
it’s also thought that those people were
no different than us today except in
their experience level so if you take a
look at that and you say okay if the
only difference between me and somebody
from 200,000 years ago is what we’ve
learned from somebody else or what we’ve
experienced then how do people figure
out things how do they discover things
for the first time how do you learn
without instruction well you have to
accept the fact that people have
limitations and they did as well they
only had their senses and their ability
to remember or recall things and they
had their brains for process
so the senses include basically the
normal ones which you’d expect
sight sound smell taste touch and
there’s also senses like the kinesthetic
sense of you can feel yourself move you
can also sense time and you are also
familiar with different things that’s
what they had to work with and using
these senses they develop strategies in
their environment where they could
discern little differences that help
them exploit you know the resources that
they had available it’s this ability to
compare things to decide whether or not
something is larger or smaller faster or
slower or if there’s more of one thing
or another thing that really conveys an
awful lot of the sense of knowledge that
people have in their lives and that’s
one of the best ways to teach people and
it turns out by extension that this is
how we learn and that we really can’t
conceive of things that are outside of
our experience level in other words we
generally learn by analogy somebody says
here I’ll compare this characteristic of
this to you and you’ll understand it
that way and that’s pretty much how we
learn but anyway getting back to the
Stone Age if you look at the early Stone
Age the the archaeological remains of
things like campfires or stone tools and
things like that we think we understand
pretty much what it was like back then
there were small groups of people
wandering around chasing food sources
hunting and gathering and it’s thought
that language developed as a way to
basically enhance cooperation between
people searching for food but I’d also
argue that there’s another aspect that
was equally important and that the fact
that they had to develop a method for
observing things and drawing conclusions
from what they saw because this is the
thing that gave them the ability to
understand migration of animals and to
understand when it was the best time to
go and pick those berries because they
were ripe so these are very very
important characteristics another thing
that they were able to do was discern
patterns they watched the motion of the
Sun in the heavens the way the moon’s
phases changed the way the stars
across the sky so they got to understand
patterns and time these are all key
components to human understanding so if
we take a look at it and we say okay
this ability to compare things leads to
grouping and grouping is a precursor to
counting so we know that early humans
didn’t have an ability to count or do
math in fact there’s languages in
existence today where there’s a concept
of one or few or many but no specific
numbering system and that’s the way
things were for quite a while until
about 20,000 years ago we find an
artifact called the Shango bond which
has three columns of tally marks cut
into it and the fact that these marks
are so regular and so organized we know
that it wasn’t developed by a random
process that it was done there as an
intentional act to record a number this
was sufficient for for a very long time
from about 20,000 years to about 6,000
years ago the number of humans didn’t
increase greatly and this seemed to be a
process that was adequate for them but
around 6,000 years ago a number of
things started to happen this is when
agriculture started to take off and it
started to take off because it was
successful agricultural products were
nutritious durable and easy to store and
there were much more reliable way of
getting food so this attracted people to
areas where agriculture was easier to do
you know river valleys and things like
that that were inundated with new
material every year to make them more
fertile so people tended to congregate
in those areas and that’s why you see
the first cities growing in these
regions and the human populations would
grow and people would settle there for
long periods of time and one of the
things that ended up happening is that
these people had to shift their focus
away from understanding the migration of
animals and how to gather wild
foodstuffs and they turn their attention
to better ways to do agriculture
and they use the same characteristics
qualities and abilities that help them
be successful is nomads to agriculture
into making agriculture better so one of
the things that they realize is that
they needed a better calendar sure they
attract you know approximately what year
it was or what time of year was
according to you know big queues and
lunar cycles and things like that but
their calendars weren’t precise enough
so it appears that because they stayed
in one place long enough somebody was
able to notice that the Sun tracked more
southerly this is in the northern
hemisphere in the winter time and moved
back up north in the summer time and
what somebody probably did is they set
up an observation point and they started
to use a fixed landmark to basically
track where the Sun rose and said every
day and eventually as these turned into
these stone circles like Stonehenge and
these other observatories and temples
where people followed the movement of
the Sun and this all happened in the
Stone Age and they developed really
really robust calendars this way and it
helped them be more successful as
farmers so let’s take a look at what
we’re talking about here what did they
do as I mentioned they observed what was
going on they tracked or measured the
movement of the Sun they recorded the
number of days in the year and they did
this over a period of time in other
words they tested it what does that
sound like to you well scientific method
is a systematic observation measurement
and experiment process where you
formulate modify and test hypotheses in
essence they were doing the scientific
method so this is going all the way back
into what we would now kind of classify
prehistory the humans were doing this
and in fact human beings have been doing
this probably as long as human beings
existed because there were a number of
developments and things that were
successful even before the advent of
Agriculture so I guess I would argue
that this is just part of
we are so if we look at all this
together you’d have to say the
scientific method is something that has
existed and is part of the human DNA
since the beginning and in fact this
predates measurement that predates
mathematics because mathematics were
just developed in order to explain the
measurements that were made in using the
scientific method so ultimately whatever
the forces were that made us who we are
we were made to do science and we can
enhance those abilities in the same way
that we can enhance any ability that we
have the same as throwing the ball you
can get better at it so in this day and
age where technology is so pervasive in
our lives it might be a good idea to
encourage observational skills to teach
your kids how to take measurements to
try new ideas to openly talk about
results and to encourage constructive
failure we might learn something
wonderful thank you [Applause]
wand
– time and I get random thoughts like
what would it be like to live in the
Stone Age
seriously I think about how
uncomfortable I’d be wearing skins and
how without central heating or air
conditioning I probably be cold and
clammy and hot and sweaty all the time
but seriously Stone Age people had to
work with the materials that they had at
hand if you take a walk in the forest
you realize what they had they had wood
that bark leaves berries twigs animals
and sex stuff like that but nothing else
and out of that they found strategies to
produce shelter provide food warmth and
protection so how did they do that well
maybe a better question I asked is how
do human beings just in general learn
things for the first time because that’s
what they had to do we think of
knowledge today and learning in terms of
what is conveyed to us somebody comes
and tells us what’s true and what
knowledge is and in the Stone Age they
had to figure it out for themselves it
was a lot more complicated process they
had to observe carefully they had to
create ideas and test those ideas and
that’s what I’m going to be talking
about today so it’s thought that modern
human beings evolved from a branch of
primates about 200,000 years ago but
it’s also thought that those people were
no different than us today except in
their experience level so if you take a
look at that and you say okay if the
only difference between me and somebody
from 200,000 years ago is what we’ve
learned from somebody else or what we’ve
experienced then how do people figure
out things how do they discover things
for the first time how do you learn
without instruction well you have to
accept the fact that people have
limitations and they did as well they
only had their senses and their ability
to remember or recall things and they
had their brains for process
so the senses include basically the
normal ones which you’d expect
sight sound smell taste touch and
there’s also senses like the kinesthetic
sense of you can feel yourself move you
can also sense time and you are also
familiar with different things that’s
what they had to work with and using
these senses they develop strategies in
their environment where they could
discern little differences that help
them exploit you know the resources that
they had available it’s this ability to
compare things to decide whether or not
something is larger or smaller faster or
slower or if there’s more of one thing
or another thing that really conveys an
awful lot of the sense of knowledge that
people have in their lives and that’s
one of the best ways to teach people and
it turns out by extension that this is
how we learn and that we really can’t
conceive of things that are outside of
our experience level in other words we
generally learn by analogy somebody says
here I’ll compare this characteristic of
this to you and you’ll understand it
that way and that’s pretty much how we
learn but anyway getting back to the
Stone Age if you look at the early Stone
Age the the archaeological remains of
things like campfires or stone tools and
things like that we think we understand
pretty much what it was like back then
there were small groups of people
wandering around chasing food sources
hunting and gathering and it’s thought
that language developed as a way to
basically enhance cooperation between
people searching for food but I’d also
argue that there’s another aspect that
was equally important and that the fact
that they had to develop a method for
observing things and drawing conclusions
from what they saw because this is the
thing that gave them the ability to
understand migration of animals and to
understand when it was the best time to
go and pick those berries because they
were ripe so these are very very
important characteristics another thing
that they were able to do was discern
patterns they watched the motion of the
Sun in the heavens the way the moon’s
phases changed the way the stars
across the sky so they got to understand
patterns and time these are all key
components to human understanding so if
we take a look at it and we say okay
this ability to compare things leads to
grouping and grouping is a precursor to
counting so we know that early humans
didn’t have an ability to count or do
math in fact there’s languages in
existence today where there’s a concept
of one or few or many but no specific
numbering system and that’s the way
things were for quite a while until
about 20,000 years ago we find an
artifact called the Shango bond which
has three columns of tally marks cut
into it and the fact that these marks
are so regular and so organized we know
that it wasn’t developed by a random
process that it was done there as an
intentional act to record a number this
was sufficient for for a very long time
from about 20,000 years to about 6,000
years ago the number of humans didn’t
increase greatly and this seemed to be a
process that was adequate for them but
around 6,000 years ago a number of
things started to happen this is when
agriculture started to take off and it
started to take off because it was
successful agricultural products were
nutritious durable and easy to store and
there were much more reliable way of
getting food so this attracted people to
areas where agriculture was easier to do
you know river valleys and things like
that that were inundated with new
material every year to make them more
fertile so people tended to congregate
in those areas and that’s why you see
the first cities growing in these
regions and the human populations would
grow and people would settle there for
long periods of time and one of the
things that ended up happening is that
these people had to shift their focus
away from understanding the migration of
animals and how to gather wild
foodstuffs and they turn their attention
to better ways to do agriculture
and they use the same characteristics
qualities and abilities that help them
be successful is nomads to agriculture
into making agriculture better so one of
the things that they realize is that
they needed a better calendar sure they
attract you know approximately what year
it was or what time of year was
according to you know big queues and
lunar cycles and things like that but
their calendars weren’t precise enough
so it appears that because they stayed
in one place long enough somebody was
able to notice that the Sun tracked more
southerly this is in the northern
hemisphere in the winter time and moved
back up north in the summer time and
what somebody probably did is they set
up an observation point and they started
to use a fixed landmark to basically
track where the Sun rose and said every
day and eventually as these turned into
these stone circles like Stonehenge and
these other observatories and temples
where people followed the movement of
the Sun and this all happened in the
Stone Age and they developed really
really robust calendars this way and it
helped them be more successful as
farmers so let’s take a look at what
we’re talking about here what did they
do as I mentioned they observed what was
going on they tracked or measured the
movement of the Sun they recorded the
number of days in the year and they did
this over a period of time in other
words they tested it what does that
sound like to you well scientific method
is a systematic observation measurement
and experiment process where you
formulate modify and test hypotheses in
essence they were doing the scientific
method so this is going all the way back
into what we would now kind of classify
prehistory the humans were doing this
and in fact human beings have been doing
this probably as long as human beings
existed because there were a number of
developments and things that were
successful even before the advent of
Agriculture so I guess I would argue
that this is just part of
we are so if we look at all this
together you’d have to say the
scientific method is something that has
existed and is part of the human DNA
since the beginning and in fact this
predates measurement that predates
mathematics because mathematics were
just developed in order to explain the
measurements that were made in using the
scientific method so ultimately whatever
the forces were that made us who we are
we were made to do science and we can
enhance those abilities in the same way
that we can enhance any ability that we
have the same as throwing the ball you
can get better at it so in this day and
age where technology is so pervasive in
our lives it might be a good idea to
encourage observational skills to teach
your kids how to take measurements to
try new ideas to openly talk about
results and to encourage constructive
failure we might learn something
wonderful thank you [Applause]
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