L. J. Rips, S. Blok, and G. Newman, ‘Tracing the Identity of Objects’, Psychological Review 113 (2006): 1–30.
38.
V. Slaughter, ‘Young Children’s Understanding of Death’, Australian Psychologist 40 (2005): 179–86.
39.
J. M. Bering and D. F. Bjorkland, ‘The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity’, Developmental Psychology 40 (2004): 217–33.
40.
J. M. Bering. ‘Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 2 (2002): 263–308.
41.
V. Slaughter and M. Lyons, ‘Learning About Life and Death in Early Childhood’, Cognitive Psychology 46 (2002), 1–30.
42.
J. M. Bering, C. Hernández-Blasi, and D. F. Bjorkland, ‘The Development of ‘Afterlife’ Beliefs in Secularly and Religiously Schooled Children’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 23 (2005): 587–607.
43.
J. M. Bering, ‘The Folk Psychology of Souls’, The Behavioural and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 453–98.
CHAPTER SIX
1.
Joseph Merrick is more commonly known as ‘John Merrick’ owing to a mistake resulting from the publication of the memoirs of his physician, Sir Frederick Treves.
2.
Aloa, the Alligator Boy, was really William Smith who was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1908. He was the last of eight children. The seventh, his sister Virginia, was also born with the same skin condition. Aloa was seen by many doctors who attributed his condition to the fright his mother had received giving birth to his sister. He was most likely born with ichthyosis, a genetically inherited skin disorder.
3.
The first case of a man with two penises (diphallia) was reported by Johannes Jacob Wecker in 1609. Diphallia has been estimated to occur in around 1 in 5.5 million male births in the United States; see K. K. Sharma, R. Jain, S. K. Jain, and A. Purohit, ‘Concealed Diphallus: A Case Report and Review of the Literature’, Journal of the Indian Association of Pediatric Surgeons 5 (2000): 18–21.
4.
S. Carey, Conceptual Change in Childhood (Bradford Books of MIT Press, 1985).
5.
S. A. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford University Press, 2003).
6.
K. Inagaki and G. Hatano, ‘Vitalistic Causality in Young Children’s Naive Biology’, Trends in Cognitive Science 8 (2004): 356–62.
7.
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for identifying the metabolic chemical reaction that produces energy in cells.
8.
J. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1979).
9.
G. L. Murphey and D. L. Medin, ‘The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence’, Psychological Review 92 (1985): 289–316.
10.
J. M. Mandler, The Foundations of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2004).
11.
P. C. Quinn and P. D. Eimas, ‘Perceptual Cues That Permit Categorical Differentiation of Animal Species by Infants’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 63 (1996): 189–211.
12.
S. Carey, ‘Sources of Conceptual Change’, in Conceptual Development: Piaget’s Legacy, edited by E. K. Scholnick, K. Nelson, S. A. Gelman, and P. H. Miller (Erlbaum, 1999): 293–326.
13.
S. Carey, ‘Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults’, Mind and Language 3 (1988): 167–81.
14.
For example, light in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges are beyond the limits of the human visual system. Likewise, humans can hear sounds only in the 20– to 20,000-hertz range.
15.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel (Walter Wanger Productions, 1956).
16.
D. L. Medin and A. Ortony, ‘Psychological Essentialism’, in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, edited by S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
17.
The best and most accessible compilation is S. A. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford University Press, 2003).
18.
S. A. Gelman and H. M. Wellman, ‘Insides and Essences: Early Understandings of the Non-obvious’, Cognition 38 (1991): 213–44.
19.
L. A. Hirschfeld, ‘Do Children Have a Theory of Race?’, Cognition 54 (1995): 209–52.
20.
S. A. Gelman and E. M. Markman, ‘Categories and Induction in Young Children’, Cognition 23 (1986): 183–209.
21.
F. Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (Bradford Books, 1989).
22.
J. H. Flavell, E. R. Flavell, and F. L. Green, ‘Development of the Appearance-Reality Distinction’, Cognitive Psychology 15 (1983): 95–120.
23.
G. E. Newman and F. C. Keil, ‘Where’s the Essence?’: Developmental Shifts in Children’s Beliefs About Internal Features’ (Child Development, in press).
24.
In fact, the idea is not to eat the potato at all. Rather, Professor Tony Trewavas of the Edinburgh Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences developed the genetically modified potato as a marker plant that could be used to monitor the crop as a whole. Simply by sowing a couple of plants in the field, the farmer would be able to regulate watering and improve yields of the normal potatoes.
25.
H. Bagis, D. Aktoprakligil, H. O. Mercan, N. Yurusev, G. Turget, S. Sekman, S. Arat, and S. Cetin, ‘Stable Transmission and Transcription of Newfoundland Ocean Pout Type III Fish Antifreeze Protein (AFP) Gene in Transgenic Mice and Hypothermic Storage of Transgenic Ovary and Testis’, Molecular Reproduction and Development 73 (2006): 1404–11.
26.
The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg (Brooksfilms, 1986).
27.
P. Savolainen, Y. Zhang, J. Luo, J. Lundeberg, and T. Leitner, ‘Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs’, Science 298 (2002): 1610–13.
28.
Stem cells come in two forms, embryonic and adult. Adult stem cell therapies are relatively uncontroversial and have been used for many years in the treatment of leukemia. In contrast, human embryonic stem cells are potentially capable of regenerative treatment for a wider variety of damaged and diseased cell conditions, but, because they involve the destruction of embryos, research and practice are still highly controversial and banned in many countries.
29.
The original study published by Joseph Vacanti and his colleagues in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 1997 caused a storm of public outrage and confused controversy. In 1999 the anti-genetic engineering group Turning Point Project took out an ad in the New York Times showing a picture of the mouse with the misleading caption, ‘This is an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back.’ The mouse was not genetically engineered, nor were there any human cells implanted in it. In fact, the bioframe was made from cow cartilage.
30.
The belief in vital life forces and energies is found in most Eastern philosophies. For a discussion of Western notions of vitalism, see E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Harvard University Press, 1982).
31.
M. Roach, Six Feet Over: Adventures in the After Life (Cannongate, 2007).
32.
D. Macdougall, ‘Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance’, American Medicine 4 (1907): 240–43.