Quotes from John Brockman

Human beings are the unequivocal world champions of niceness. We act kindly not only toward people who belong to our own social groups or can reciprocate our generosity but also toward strangers thousands of miles away who will never know we helped them. All around the world, people sacrifice their resources, well-being, and even their lives in the service of others.

Tadpoles were cloned in 1952, but few focused on that process until 1997, when the announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep begat wonder, consternation, and fear.

In Europe, the present is perceived as the endpoint of history. In America, the present is perceived as the beginning of the future.

people judge people as less moral when they act altruistically and gain in the process than when they gain from clearly nonaltruistic behavior.

new ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new "outlooks." (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term "outlook" is the German Fragestellung—literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a worldview from which that question can arise.)

To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The trick was to inhibit the easy, obvious, but ineffective attempts, permitting a better solution

people view "tainted altruism" as worse than no altruism at all.

A true psychology has got to be an evolutionary psychology. Whether

evolutionary psychologists have got it right. We are evolved beings and therefore our psychology will have to be understood in terms of natural selection, among other factors.

Information is a measure of uncertainty reduced.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These

But discoveries are what usually egg us on. Not finding anything would be very bad indeed.

new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

If sensory recognition worked on the grandmother principle, the number of specific-recognition neurons for all possible combinations of nerve impulses would exceed the number of atoms in the universe.

in its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology.

One in every four species of mammals (1,141 of the 5,487 mammalian species on Earth) is threatened with extinction.

Science is not a practice so much as an ideology.

if we wish to understand why, as humans, we often act in certain predictable ways (and particularly if there is a desire or need to change these behavioral responses), we can remember our animal heritage and look for the possible releasers that seem to stimulate our fixed-action patterns.

seminary students in a rush were far less likely to help a stranger than were seminary students who weren't late, in the experiment performed by John M. Darley and Dan Batson).

The story emerging from these studies is not yet complete, but it has already led to fascinating insights. Thanks to its microbes, a baby can better digest its mother's milk. And your ability to digest carbohydrates relies to a significant extent on enzymes that can be made only by genes present not in you but in your microbiome.

Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don't know us well enough.

It's an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness.

The kids who could wait fifteen minutes for a marshmallow had an SAT score that was, on average, 210 points higher than that of the kids who could wait only thirty seconds.

Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.