Quotes About Science

in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3

cuando las personas aumentan su curiosidad intelectual y su cultura científica, dejan de creer en milagros.

Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times.

Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I'll turn to in the final chapter.)

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don't want to believe them!

Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!"—Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?

But the fact that experts' assertions about maximum possible life expectancy have repeatedly been shattered (on average five years after they were published) raises the question of whether longevity will increase indefinitely and someday slip the surly bonds of mortality entirely.

Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.

The Enlightenment has worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today's intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live.

As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To

What launched the Great Escape? The most obvious cause was the application of science to the improvement of material life, leading to what the economic historian Joel Mokyr calls "the enlightened economy.

The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts.

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge; but that's the problem.

Door aan het licht te brengen dat de wetten die in het universum gelden geen doel hebben, dwingen wetenschappelijke krachten ons verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor ons eigen welzijn, onze soort en onze planeet.

Many scholars in "science studies" devote their careers to recondite analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense

It's often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.

Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. The application of reason and observation to discover tentative generalizations about the world is what we call science.

Because our propositional reasoning frees us from similarity and stereotypes, it enables the highest achievements of human rationality, such as science, morality, and law.