Quotes About Science

He argued that science is social in its very essence in the ways in which skills, standards, and tacit understandings are transmitted from person to person in an institutional system in which members act freely but work within mutual consensus.

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.

In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.

a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place—and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is—the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That's it? That's it.

Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.

Jesse's curiosity about psychedelics was first piqued during a drug education unit in his junior high school science class. This particular class of drugs was neither physically nor psychologically addictive, he was told (correctly);

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.

Noi avem tendinÈ›a s? ne îndrept?m atenÈ›ia È™i È™tiinÈ›a spre via?? È™i creÈ™tere, dar fireÈ™te c? moartea È™i descompunerea nu sunt mai puÈ›in importante pentru operaÈ›iile naturii, iar ciupercile sunt st?pânii necontestaÈ›i ai acestui t?râm.

Compared with many scientists—or for that matter many spiritual types—Roland Griffiths possesses a large measure of what Keats, referring to Shakespeare, described as "negative capability," the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality.

The scientists haven't tested the hypothesis yet, but I'm willing to bet that when they do they'll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their overall health and happiness.

Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood. For to enter a world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help.

Both the mushroom and its psychoactive compound were unknown to science until the 1950s, when the psilocybin mushroom was discovered in southern Mexico, where Mazatec Indians had been using "the flesh of the gods," in secret, for healing and divination since before the Spanish conquest.

LSD too, it is easy to forget, was derived from a fungus, Claviceps purpurea, or ergot.

Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650—very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I'll wait awhile.

A maneira de comer é um dos meios mais poderoso que um povo tem de expressar e preservar sua identidade cultural. (...) Tornar as opções alimentares mais científicas é esvaziá-las de seu conteúdo étnico e de sua história.

I asked him if he agreed with something I'd read the Dalai Lama had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without question by most scientists—"is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact." "Bingo," Jesse said. "And for someone with my orientation"—agnostic, enamored of science—"that changes everything.

As the whole-grain food synergy study suggests, science doesn't know nearly enough to compensate for everything that processing does to whole foods. We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again. Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it.

Michael Pollan