Quotes About Science

By 1998, members of the United States National Academy of Sciences, an elite elected group sponsored by the federal government, were approaching complete atheism. Only 10 percent testified to a belief in either God or immortality. Among them were a scant 2 percent of the biologists. In modern civilizations, there is no overwhelming importance in the general populace to belong to an organized religion. Witness

To make discoveries in science, both small and important, you must be an expert on the topic addressed. To be an expert innovator requires commitment. Commitment to a subject implies sustained hard work.

Original discoveries, to remind you, are what counts the most. Let me put that more strongly: they are all that counts. They are the silver and gold of science.

Scientific humanism is] the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature.

let's also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.

If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.

There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he's a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I've had have actually been with scientists doing research.

scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success in life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science. It is the latter who stay active in research for a lifetime.

innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.

Scientists by nature tend to be cautious in anything they say about religion, even when expressing skepticism. The distinguished physiologist Anton (Ajax) J. Carlson, when asked what he thought of the 1950 ex cathedra (that is, infallible) pronouncement by Pius XII that the Virgin Mary ascended bodily into heaven, is reported to have responded that he couldn't be sure because he wasn't there, but of one thing he was certain, that she passed out at thirty thousand feet.

Like the sunlight and the firelight that guided our birth, we need a unified humanities and science to construct a full and honest picture of what we truly are and what we can become.

The conflict between scientific knowledge and the teachings of organized religions is irreconcilable. The chasm will continue to widen and cause no end of trouble as long as religious leaders go on making unsupportable claims about supernatural causes of reality.

Original discoveries, to remind you, are what count the most. Let me put that more strongly: they are all that counts. They are the silver and gold of science.

Perhaps the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized - made part of the new synthesis.

if our conception of human nature is to be altered, it must be by means of truths conforming to the canons of scientific evidence and not a new dogma however devoutly wished for.

the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition.

Science has become the most democratic of all human endeavors. It is neither religion nor ideology. It makes no claims beyond what can be sensed in the real world. It generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.

Science owns the warrant to explore everything deemed factual and possible, but the humanities, borne aloft by both fact and fantasy, have the power of everything not only possible but also conceivable.

What counts in science is the importance of the discovery. What matters in literature is the originality and power of the metaphor.

And as to the wonders of modern technology, bear in mind that a sidewalk weed and a protozoan are each more complex than any device yet invented by humanity.

It follows that most people would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of His capacity.

If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps. [Criticizing Richard Dawkins]