The science of linguistics has helped to reconstruct the long road the ancestors of modern day Indians traveled in North America. At the time of the discovery of the New World, line explorers found a babel of tongues. In North and South America more languages were spoken—about 2, 200 of them—than all of Europe and Asia at that time. Despite what some early explorers and European scholars believed, there never was such a language as "American Indian"—meaning, presumably, one common language with only local dialects. Rather than one common language that linked the Indians of North America, about 550 distinct languages were spoken, and nearly every language comprised numerous dialects. A second misconception was that a language had to be written to rank as a full-fledged language. In North America, a truly written language developed only in Mexico, yet most Indian groups were able to communi
A. there was one common language spoken throughout the land
B. they discovered a placed called Babel
C. written language was an important means of communication
D. there were many languages spoken, most with many dialects
Science fiction has a tendency to become science fact. Something like Hal, the on-board spaceship computer capable of ethical decision making and intelligence in Arthur Clarke’s 2001:A space Odyssey , is being discussed seriously in modern artificial-intelligence (AI) laboratories. (46) That is not to say that computers will evolve exactly as Clarke envisioned, any more than propulsion systems developed in the way Jules Verne imagined three-quarters of a century before a rocked sent a spaceship to the moon. (47)However, computer scientists are developing systems that come very close to mimicking parts of human cognition;it seems plausible that something like Hal will be around before you depart from this earth.
(48) Computerized cognition, or artificial intelligence (AI), as it is often called, is broadly defined as that branch of computer science that deals with the development of computers (hardware) and computer programs (software) that emulate h
Science has long since had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Galileo’s 17th-century trifil’ for his rebelling belief the Catholic Church or poet William Black’s harsh remarks against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century~
Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics- but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked ’ antiscience’ in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.
Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason", held in New York City in 1995, and "Science in the A
A. impartial
B. subjective
C. biased
D. puzzling
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