…evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say ‘I believe in gravity, one should not proclaim ‘I believe in evolution.
A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you’re given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.
Science ignores the spiritual realm because it is not amenable to scientific analysis. As importantly, the predictive success of Newtonian theory, emphasizing the primacy of a physical Universe, made the existence of spirit and God an extraneous hypothesis that offered no explanatory principles needed by science.
Once we lose touch of our human curiosity, it becomes very difficult to ever build back an appreciation for the fact we actually know very little
I wanted to repeat we cannot vote confidence at any point on a confidence motion in a government that fails to have a climate target that’s ground in science and consistent with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we must do.
If a purposeful Tuner exists, it makes sense that the deeper our search into the features of the cosmos, the more evidence of fine-tuning this search will reveal. If no purposeful Tuner exists, then a deeper search will reveal less and less specificity and intentionality. A fine-tuner’s attributes and purposes will become either increasingly clear or increasingly vague.
Using the tools developed by physicists in the last century, biologists in this century are poised to enact their own scientific revolution. Time will tell whether years from now another book will describe how biologists changed the future. But on thing is for sure—we will not be able to embrace and participate in that future without the discipline, curiosity, questioning, and reasoning that science requires.
We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we’ve always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn’t. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.
When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.
It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ (Lit.: ‘Thing-ies’) or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five ‘flavours’, known as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘sideways’, ‘sex appeal’ and ‘peppermint’.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.
I make fiction to escape reality, and philosophical revelations to cope with it
My hope is that evidence for the exquisite fine-tuning observed at all astronomical levels, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the ground beneath our feet, arouses a profound sense of awe and wonder. My greater hope is that this awe and wonder will inspire readers to ponder the deep questions raised by a close-up glimpse of nature’s unfolding story.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species – if separate species we be – for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person’s spirit from his body.
My divinity is not rootedin god or scripture,my divinity is rootedin human welfare.My science is not rootedin cold logic venture,my science is rootedin human welfare.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
Those who dwell in the midst of the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It’s not a miracle; we just decided to go.
We’re all connected. We’re all stardust. We’re all energy. At our core, we are all the same.
The TV scientist who mutters sadly, The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for, is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another.
The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.
Science and art,… they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,… then they only complicate and encumber life.
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
What men could freely pursue, women had to wait for men to permit them access to.
I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I’m supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I’m praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.
The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.
It’s good to ‘waste’ money on such a moral and esthetic venture. These are our cathedrals. don’t think it is fair to say they are our [Roman] circuses, for that is not the tone. We ought to see to it that people live well, but a part of living well is blowing money on big excitement, curiosity, entertainment, conversation.
That car should say ‘Science for all hominids!’” the ape cried. “Are we not hominids, too, just like the humans?” The apes roared in agreement, pounding their chests and stamping their feet.Teeth bared and eyes glinting, the apes leapt onto the car, vociferating the phrase, “For homo erectus!
The community of microbes living in your gut—your so-called microbiota—is like another organ of your body. It’s a seething alien living inside of you, fermenting your food and jealously protecting you against interlopers. It’s a pretty unusual organ by any measure, but even more so in that its composition changes with every meal.
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
He [William Jennings Bryan] recognized that what Darwin proposed on the biological level, when applied on the societal level, might legitimize an ideology that supports the survival of the fittest, with all of its dire complications. Byran was able to envision the kind of society that Social Darwinism would create- the kind of exploitation that comes from unbridled capitalism, for instance- and chose to war against it.
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Science is far from the center of the world for most people: even for many with highly sophisticated tastes, interests, and accomplishments.
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.
The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.
Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.
So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.
Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways in science, in politics, in every bold intention.
I’m sorry to tell you that another Dani was found wandering around the time station in our building, confused and disoriented.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.
Mind is the tether between facts and science,Mind is the line of life between words and poetry.People are the tether between mind and meaning,Soil is the tether between human and humility.
Us versus them is not in our genes. It is something we learn.
Luckily, even when people are shouting lies, the truth is undamaged. Science doesn’t matter what you believe.
The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
The new Pandora’s boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed.
In whatever disease sleep is laborious, it is a deadly symptom; but if sleep does good, it is not deadly.
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.
Music is science more than art, and it is the main code of the universe.
The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.