Quotes from Steven J. Dick

What is crucial here, however, is this anthropological point: that contemporary science is as cultural as shamanism, opera, Catholicism, or the Boy Scouts. It does not stand outside of culture in a space of perfect objectivity.

Scientists are people, and they are subject to the influences of their times. Theories explaining the world change diachronically or vary synchronically not only because of variation in the available data, but because of change and variation in the people producing the theories. Objectivity itself is culturally constituted.

W]e can discover the world, but we decide upon the truth.

We are deciphering how all known objects - form atoms to galaxies, from cells to brains, from people to society - are interrelated. For the more we examine nature, the more everything seems related to everything else.

The more we know about science, the more we know culture and cosmos are connected, to such an extent that we can now see that the cosmos is inextricably intertwined with human destiny, both in the short term and the long-term, impinging on (and arguably essential to) questions normally reserved for religion and philosophy.

Can we reconcile the observed constructiveness of cosmic evolution with the inherent destructiveness of thermodynamics? Specifically how have the magnificent examples of order all around us arisen from chaos?