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How Evolution Changed the Meanings of Adaptation, Fitness and Selection

Everyday words became technical concepts in evolutionary biology. Their scientific meanings are narrower, more relational and often very different from popular interpretations.

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Comparison

Comparison articles

5 published articles

Comparison · 3 min

How Psychology Turned Everyday Words into Technical Terms

Attention, memory, intelligence, personality and motivation sound familiar, but psychology turns them into constructs that must be defined, measured and tested.

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Comparison · 3 min

Skull or Cranium? Why the Body Has Two Vocabularies

Why English often has an everyday body word and a separate clinical one, from skull/cranium and heart/cardiac to kidney/renal and skin/dermal.

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Comparison · 3 min

How Physics Reused Everyday Words: Work, Force, Power, Field and Charge

Physics gives exact meanings to familiar words. Understanding the gap between everyday and technical usage explains many common misconceptions in mechanics and electricity.

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Comparison · 4 min

The Difference Between Incidence and Prevalence

Incidence measures new cases arising over time; prevalence measures all existing cases in a population. Learn the formulas, variants and reasons the two measures can move differently.

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