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"In a 1957 experiment that helped launch the modern study of language acquisition, the late Roger Brown showed that children know that if you say, "C… - Gary F. Marcus
"In a 1957 experiment that helped launch the modern study of language acquisition, the late Roger Brown showed that children know that if you say, "Can you see a sib?" you probably have in mind an action or a process. No other mammal seems to be equipped to use such clues for word learning.
Even more dramatically, no other species seems to be able to make much of word order. The difference between the sentence "Dog bites man" and the sentence "Man bites dog" is largely lost on our nonhuman cousins. There is a bit of evidence that Kanzi can pay attention to word order to some tiny extent, but certainly not in anything like as rich a fashion as a three-year-old human child."
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In the years to come, some of our best minds will try to dig deeper into that computer program, to figure out its individual lines of code (the IF-THENS that we call genes), the products of those lines (what we call proteins), how all those lines of biological code fit together, and how they make room for nurture.
In the long run, the effects on society will be profound. Take, for example, the advances that our increasing understanding of genes will lead to in medicine. Because, as we have seen, the brain is built like the rest of the body, it is also amenable to many of the same types of treatment. For example, stem cell therapies originally developed for leukemia are being adapted to treat Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease. Gene therapies developed for cystic fibrosis may someday help treat brain tumors. Both work by harnessing the body's own toolkit for development.
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To the extent that genomes can be thought of as compressed encodings of biological structures, they are spectacularly efficient. All the trillions of cells in the human body-not just the tens of billions in the brain-are guided in one way or another by the information contained in 30,000 or so genes. The best high-quality set of pictures of the body- the National Institutes of Health Visible Human Project, a series of high-resolution digital photos of slices taken from volunteer Joseph Paul Jernigan (deceased)-takes up about 60 gigabytes, enough (if left uncompressed) to fill about 100 CD-ROMs-and still not enough detail to capture individual cells. The genome, in contrast, contains only about 3 billion nucleotides, the equivalent (at two bits per nucleotide) of less than two-thirds of a gigabyte, or a single CD-ROM.
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