Massimo Pigliucci Quotes

…the boundaries separating science, nonscience, and pseudoscience are much fuzzier and more permeable than (or, for that matter, most scientists) would have us believe. There is, in other words, no l...

It seems to me trivially true that particle physics does in fact deal with the simplest objects in the entire universe: atoms and their constituents. At the opposite extreme, biology takes on the most...

About Author

Massimo Pigliucci (Italian: [ˈmassimo piʎˈʎuttʃi]; born January 16, 1964) is an American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience (including creationism), and an advocate for secularism and science education. His recent work has focused on stoicism.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.-Adam Smith

Or maybe, another explanation goes, we are in fact surrounded by ETs and simply don't know it, perhaps because they decided to make the solar system a natural reserve, a place where other races can go...

The many-worlds theory basically maintains that the reason quantum mechanics seems so strange is because we have access to only one of an infinite number of worlds. From our narrow perspective, the ou...

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact. —Thomas Sowell, American economist

One does not need experiments to do science. While this claim may sound strange and counterintuitive at first, a moment's reflection will show that it is obviously true: astronomers do not conduct exp...

Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one. There is a way to understand

We are not becoming more educated; we are simply acquiring more knowledge. There is a fundamental difference between the two.

We must require an agreement to the principle that there are no sacred cows. Anything and everything must be the subject of free inquiry and skeptical investigation. To allow otherwise, for practical...

It is instructive to note that different cultures discovered completely different constellations in the sky, a fact that is more consistent with the idea that constellations are a whimsical projection...

Are we going to teach the best of what we currently know about the world (however provisional such knowledge may be), or shall we decide if the earth is flat or round by majority consensus?

If I think (and I do) that Deepak Chopra talks nonsense when he tells people about quantum mechanical elixirs of youth, I would first have to be an expert in quantum mysticism. But the problem is that...

British astronomer royal Richard Woolley, who in 1956 said, All this talk about space travel is utter bilge, really.10 Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth just five years later.

The nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better...

CEI in 1992 advised the Food and Drug Administration to approve recombinant bovine somatotropin, which is a bioengineered growth hormone. Now surely such recommendation would be accompanied by the fur...

These and similar examples are easy enough to uncover, and they make two crucial points: first, good science does not require experiments, it can be done with an intelligent use of observational evide...