Quotes About Science

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.

the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated.

four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that "the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].

Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.

Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or "determinist." The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.

The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is "that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

The Scientific Revolution had revealed that everyday experience is a narrow slice of a vast continuum of scales from the microscopic to the astronomical, and that our own abode is a rock orbiting a star rather than the center of creation.

We live in an era of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of "forces," "pressures," "processes," and "developments." It is easy to forget that those "forces" are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not.

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.

Today the campaign for world government lives on mainly among kooks and science fiction fans.

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or

Many cognitive neuroscientists suspect that mirror neurons may have a role in mentally representing the concept of an action, though even that is disputed. Most reject the extravagant claims that they can explain uniquely human abilities, and today virtually no one equates their activity with the emotion of sympathy.23

I've seen the answer: some of them figure, "If that's what science is, I might as well make money!" Four years later their brainpower is applied to thinking up algorithms that allow hedge funds to act on financial information a few milliseconds faster rather than to finding new treatments for Alzheimer's disease or technologies for carbon capture and storage.

What about a more abstract sense of "spirituality"? If it consists in gratitude for one's existence, awe at the beauty and immensity of the universe, and humility before the frontiers of human understanding, then spirituality is indeed an experience that makes life worth living—and one that is lifted into higher dimensions by the revelations of science and philosophy.

I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005."43 (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.)

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science

Far from sprouting from the grass roots or channeling the anger of know-nothings, the disdain for reason, science, humanism, and progress has a long pedigree in elite intellectual and artistic culture.

But the most powerful contributor was science. "It is knowledge that is the key," Deaton argues. "Income—although important both in and of itself and as a component of wellbeing . . .—is not the ultimate cause of wellbeing.

Word learning is as scandalous an induction problem as the acquisition of syntax or the practice of science, because there are an infinite number of generalizations, most of them wrong, that are logically consistent with any sample of experiences