Quotes About Science

I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments,52 but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law.53 Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any individual's ability to reason.

What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.35 As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.

Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you.

Morality binds and blinds. Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore this principle and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices.

If people can literally see what they want to see—given a bit of ambiguity—is it any wonder that scientific studies often fail to persuade the general public?

And now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion twenty-four hours a day. Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain, just Google your belief. You'll find partisan websites summarizing and sometimes distorting relevant scientific studies. Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you.

Maybe we're just prisoners of our biology.

The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. (36)

Il sangue trasmette una propensione alle malattie cardiache; se trasmette anche una propensione al tradimento, nessuno è mai riuscito a dimostrarlo.

Mi spieghi, per favore, cosa intende per razza. Perché per me è un concetto scientificamente indefinibile e quindi privo di valore teorico.

Holy Christ . . . are we talking zombies here?" Church smiled faintly. "We're calling him a 'walker.' Short for 'Dead Man Walking.' The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility.

It's cloaked in cultural mumbo jumbo, but I assure you that it is very hard science.

How negative eugenics, as it came to be known, emerged as the focus of the movement is, on one hand, complicated, involving many different fields of science and points of view, all occurring within a context of massive social disruptions. But on the other hand, it's not complicated at all. We like having people exist lower on the pecking order than we do. And so the great sorting of humans into categories of deficiency gave eugenicists the perfect target: the abnormals and defectives.

the plural of "anecdote" is "data.

Society, not science, determines what is normal in the lives we lead, and that, right now, is the problem.

A basic principle of science—of liberal social life—is that we kill our hypotheses rather than each other .

The greater threat lies in our letting down our guard against ourselves: in high-mindedly embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion, as the Marxists did. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.

liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail.

This is, more or less, what the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive, not because it proves true statements, but because it seeks systematically to disprove (falsify) false ones.

There is nothing like absolute certainty in the whole field of our knowledge," writes Popper.

Impelled by the notions that science is oppression and criticism is violence, the central regulation of debate and inquiry is returning to respectability—this time in a humanitarian disguise.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They speak different languages and use different powers of the brain.