Science
Our eyes are the highest bandwidth pathway into our minds.
Ian Reid
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts…for support rather than illumination.
Andrew Lang
The Three Laws of Prediction
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
No substantial part of the universe is so simple that it can be grasped and controlled without abstraction. Abstraction consists in replacing the part of the universe under consideration by a model of a similar but simpler structure. Models are thus a central necessity of scientific procedure.
Rosenblueth and Wiener
There was once an old man, a priest, who because of his religious conviction could not allow for evolution. He wrote many tracts against it. One day he was sitting in the woods and saw an insect hidden in the leaf litter. Suddenly it dawned on him that this insect was an example of evolution. So he stepped on it.
I don’t like it and I’m sorry I had anything to do with it.
Erwin Schrödinger commenting on his eponymous equations.
That’s not right. It’s not even wrong.
Wolfgang Pauli
There is nothing that can’t be invented if the economic incentive exists.
Andrew J. Salthouse
We are survival machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
Richard Dawkins—The Selfish Gene
Being neutral with regard to religion does not equate to avoiding scientific facts that some religious groups reject based upon their faith.
Steven Novella
Everything which is not forbidden, is compulsory.
Murray Gell-Mann's Totalitarian Principle
I wish they [the media] would give up their false notion of balance when it comes to matters of reality.
Phil Plait
In the humanities…it's all about arguing competing viewpoints and building a strong case for one's position, but in the end, things are mostly a matter of opinion. In science, things are demonstrably false. And once they have been demonstrated as such, it is disingenuous (if not outright dishonest) to pretend they still have any validity. Science is not a matter of opinion.
Jennifer Ouellette
I have been thinking that if I am much execrated as an atheist, etc., whether the admission of the doctrine of natural selection could injure your works; but I hope and think not, for as far as I can remember, the virulence of bigotry is expended on the first offender, and those who adopt his views are only pitied as deluded, by the wise and cheerful bigots.
Charles Darwin in a letter to Charles Lyell
Skepticism is not a set of beliefs, it is a set of methods for asking questions about reality. Skeptics are also a diverse group—but we do tend to come to similar conclusions on basic questions where logic and evidence is likely to lead a reasonable person to a particular opinion.
Steven Novella
We are all star stuff.
Carl Sagan
So, add up all these anecdotes and what do you get? A big pile of anecdotes!
The Macalope
I have a solution to your time theory: what if the earth is billions of years old but God didn’t create time until 6,000 years ago?
Some Creationist
Evolution is so simple almost anyone can misunderstand it.
David Hull
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
Charles Darwin
Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it would stop.
Dara O'Briain
[W]e have big brains simply because of chance and the fact that having a smaller brain, in our peculiar niche, meant you either died or didn't get laid.
PZ Myers
For me, it's either faith or science - you can't have both.
Craig Venter
You cannot test the mere existence of gods, but you can test claims that your gods do something, that is, interact with the world.
Jerry A. Coyne
To wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough to claim persecution at the hands of unsympathetic science. You must also be right.
Orac
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka”, but “That’s odd…”
Probably not Isaac Asimov
Because we don't understand the brain very well we're constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
John R. Searle
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan
When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not ‘measuring’ the world, we are creating it.
Niels Bohr
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould
If homeopathy works, then obviously the less you use it, the stronger it gets. So the best way to apply homeopathy is to not use it at all.
Phil Pliat
Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion . . The claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith. These are irreconcilable approaches to knowing, which ensures an eternity of debate wherever and whenever the two camps meet.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.
Robert Heinlein
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth’s surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.
Francis Crick
We are explaining more every day. We are understanding more every day; consequently your God is growing smaller every day.
Robert Ingersoll (1872)
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.
Sean Carroll
It is simply common sense at its best – rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Huxley
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
There is no observed phenomenon in this Universe that cannot, in principle, be scientifically explained by natural laws and processes.
Ethan Siegel
One of the most amazing facts to comprehend about the Universe is that it actually is comprehensible!
Ethan Siegel
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin—The final sentence of On the Origin of Species
I lose sleep worrying that we, as a species, are indeed simply too stupid to figure out the universe.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Science insists that we be open to all possibilities, and let the data decide which is true.
Sean Carroll
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Stephen Jay Gould
The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
Lawrence M. Krauss
Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments.
Victor Stenger
Proof is for mathematics and alcohol.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any communication system can be hijacked and exploited by an external party.
Matthew Cobb
I would be quite proud to have served on the committee that designed the E. coli genome. There is, however, no way that I would admit to serving on a committee that designed the human genome. Not even a university committee could botch something that badly.
David Penny
The idea that our intuitions about cause and effect that we get from our everyday experience of the world should somehow be extended without modification to the fundamental nature of reality is fairly absurd.
Sean Carroll
What remains unchanged in all areas of life, however, is the underlying philosophy: namely, to constrain our theories as strongly as possible by empirical evidence, and to modify or reject those theories that fail to conform to the evidence. That is what I mean by the scientific worldview.
Alan Sokal
Everything is the way it is because of how it got that way.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The more I want something to be true, the higher I set the bar of evidence, to make sure I don’t get fooled.
Phil Plait
Years of analyzing popular but dubious claims leads to the impression that just about all knowledge that filters down to the popular consciousness is essentially wrong, at least as a first approximation.
Steven Novella
Science! It’s just magic without the lies.
Dante Shepherd
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.
Charles Darwin
We carry with us 10–100 times more bacteria than there are cells that make us up. We may think we are the pinnacle of evolution, but we are just sentient transport and feeding machines for bacteria.
Mark Crislip
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg
The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.
Michael Russell
The three most dangerous words in medicine: in my experience.
Mark Crislip
Was Heisenberg a good physicist?
Well, he was and he wasn‘t.
Your whole life is a great long exercise in risk management where you balance doing things against cowering in terror.
PZ Myers
Living causes cancer.
PZ Myers
Homeopathy: Dilutions of Grandeur
We evolved from a random sequence of evolutionary accidents, existing only because certain characteristics keep us marginally ahead in the arms race of existence. Nature is not pure and benign, it has no wisdom and it does not exist to nourish us and help us thrive. Nature is vicious, harmful and for thousands of years has been trying to fucking kill us.
The Angry Chef
Our ability to control the natural world, to process and store foods and to adapt our environment to meet our requirements is the one thing that has kept our head above the evolutionary waters and saved us from the miserable fate that befell every other hominid species in history.
The Angry Chef
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
When a scientist says something, his colleagues must ask themselves only whether it is true. When a politician says something, his colleagues must first of all ask, “Why does he say it?”
Leo Szilard
[N]atural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer—a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him, whether it be pieces of string, fragments of wood, or old cardboards; in short, it works like a tinkerer who uses everything at his disposal to produce some kind of workable object.
François Jacob
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996)
Science is our best way of drawing conclusions about the natural world, including how natural and human-caused phenomena work and interact together. When politics, biases, agendas or predispositions get in the way, however, they can derail actual knowledge and cause us to live in an inferior fashion.
Ethan Siegel
Trying to understand perception by understanding neurons is like trying to understand a bird’s flight by studying only feathers. It just cannot be done.
David Marr
The whole east vs west thing is a false dichotomy. The only thing that matters is science-based vs fantasy-based.
Steven Novella
Mathematicians will math a problem until it can be mathed no more, until it has given up all of its secrets in every exhaustible fashion.
Ethan Siegel
So you pick the expert opinions you can find that agree with your opinions, and use that to justify your reasoning. That’s thinking like a lawyer, and that approach is fruitless in science.
Ethan Siegel
Your experience of yourself and the world is completely constructed by your brain. You don’t directly experience your sensory input. Rather, that input is filtered, altered, analyzed, compared, and then finally constructed into a seamless experience.
Steven Novella
What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail.
PZ Myers
Perception is highly subjective and constructed. We don’t “see” the world so much as construct an internal model of it from highly filtered, selected, and sparse sensory cues. Further, expectation drives perception to a significant degree – our brains fill in the gaps and construct our perception to meet expectation.
Steven Novella
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
Charles Darwin
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have smart people doing smart things and stupid people doing stupid things. But for smart people to do stupid things, that takes religion.
paraphrase of Steven Weinberg
What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Werner Heisenberg
The whole of our bodies are an elaborate efflorescence that blooms gloriously for a few years to spread our seed, or to help others spread their seed. If the flower wilts after it has done its job, evolution doesn’t care — if another one blooms next year, it will continue.
PZ Myers
An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.
David Dunning
Our perception of reality is all constructed. Your brain compares multiple sensory streams simultaneously and synchronizing them with each other and with internal models of reality. The end result is a seamless cognitive illusion of reality.
Steven Novella
Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate and dispassionate study of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous.
Charles Darwin
Drugs derived from plants are basically poisons that we have purified, usually altered, and then discovered a dose range that can be safely exploited.
Steven Novella
The first step in any valid science–a clear definition. If you can’t do that, then it is impossible to have meaningful and interpretable research outcomes.
Steven Novella
The Universe is a pretty strange place, and given enough building material and time, things that seem unusual may in fact be commonplace.
Phil Plait
Humans are the most software of any species on the planet. We are born the least fated to be who we will be as anyone else we’re mostly software much less hardware than almost anything else.
Heather Heying
[I]t is evident that, in spite of the fact that it could produce enormous horror in the world, science is of value because it can produce something.
Richard Feynman
The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
Stephen Jay Gould
Don’t accept the chauvinistic tradition that labels our era the age of mammals. This is the age of arthropods. They outnumber us by any criterion--by species, individuals, by prospects for evolution- ary continuation. Some 8 percent of all named animal species are arthropods, the vast majority insects.
Stephen Jay Gould
The greatest impediment to scientific innovation is usually a conceptual lock, not a factual lack.
Stephen Jay Gould
The firm requirement for all science—whether stereotypical or historical—lies in secure testability, not direct observation. We must be able to determine whether our hypotheses are definitely wrong or probably correct…
Stephen Jay Gould
There are two possible outcomes: If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.
Enrico Fermi