Quotes from Heather E. Heying

Seek authorities who are willing to both show you how they arrived at their conclusions and admit when they have made mistakes.

Everyone can and should learn to be a better observer... Observing your world carefully, becoming aware of your own bias, of your own previously held beliefs and how they limit what you can see — it's utterly necessary if you are to have independence of thought. And if you don't have independence of thought, what do you have?

Either way, modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming.

Chesterton wrote this of a "fence or gate erected across a road": The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Like all social, long-lived organisms with long childhoods and overlap between our generations, we need to learn how to be adults. That is different, however, from needing to be taught.

Science functions best when all hypotheses are on the table. Some will be easily dismissed. Others will prove recalcitrant to falsification, even if we eventually come to understand that they are not true. But what science needs, above all else, is the freedom to discuss the possibilities. Without that, there will be no new discoveries.

We work side by side, and some of us imagine that because we are equal under the law, we are also the same. We are and should be equal under the law. But we are not the same - despite what some activists and politicians, journalists and academics would have us believe.

Those who advocate for a raw diet suggest that it is the healthiest, most natural way to eat. Cooking, they say, is a modern bastardization of the human diet. This is simply wrong.

It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative.

Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that thing is different.

When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.

The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.

Gestation and lactation are anatomically, physiologically mandated features of being a female mammal.

It is likely that our highly geometric homes and playgrounds, which make up so much of what we see during early childhood, calibrate our eyes such that we suffer from such illusions far more than do those in the rest of the world.

they are, as a country, starving? It's yet another paradox, which is, we argue, a kind of treasure map. When you see a paradox, keep digging.

humans deserve a night sky, a sky full of possibilities—sometimes of clouds, often the moon, occasionally planets, nearly always stars and the Milky Way in which we live.

Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty -physical, emotional and intellectual- is necessary.

Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool's game.

Keep an eye out for other things that we moderns might be trying to rid ourselves of without sufficiently understanding their function—not only Chesterton's organs, but his gods and his breast milk, his cuisine and his play.

So if fitness is about persistence, then the apropos question is, The persistence of what?

We'd mistaken our few experiences swimming in the river for the wisdom of actually knowing a place. How could we have been so wrong?

At no other time in history has it been possible to think that you are a local but to be so lacking the deep knowledge of a place that keeps you safe during rare events. We moderns struggle to grasp this gap in our knowledge for many reasons. For starters, we no longer rely on tight-knit communities or a deep understanding of local terrain like humans did until recently.

when it rains in the mountains, stay out of the river.

Functional systems need those advocating for both—for culture and for consciousness, for orthodoxy and heterodoxy, for the sacred and the shamanistic.