When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
What if renewable energy rolled out on a grand scale proves so environmentally damaging that it does great harm? Bio-energy, a policy intended to forestall global warming, is already killing hundreds...
We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing t...
Uma das coisas mais fascinantes da raça humana é não haver duas pessoas iguais. (...) No comportamento, tal como na aparência, cada ser humano é único.
To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom.
These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.
These days, the cancer cells often need another mutation to thrive: one that will outwit the chemotherapy or radiotherapy to which the cancer is subjected. Somewhere in the body, one of the cancer cel...
Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits....
The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.
The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,’ wrote William Easterly.
The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expan...
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
The environment that a child experiences is as much a consequence of the child’s genes as it is of external factors: the child seeks out and creates his or her own environment. If she is of a mechanic...
Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming.
Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.
It is all but inevitable that we occupy a favoured location, one of the rare neighbourhoods where by-laws allow the emergence of intelligent life.’ No anthropic principle needed.
In Bletchley, in Britain, in 1943, in total secrecy, a brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, is seeing his most incisive insight turned into physical reality. Turing has argued that numbers can comput...
Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.
Fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.
Every innovation to this day is the result of thousands of people exchanging ideas.