We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.
Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don’t look so surprised. I’m not saying anything you don’t know. Sinc...
There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no i...
The technician consulted the enclosed documents. Lizard is biting local children. They have a question about identification of the species, and a concern about diseases transmitted from the bite. She...
The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagi...
Sometimes agents were so influenced by one another that they lost track of their goal and did something else instead. In that sense, the program was very childlike, unpredictable and easily distracted...
She had discovered long ago that you could use a computer without understanding how it worked. Just as you could use an automobile, vacuum cleaner - or your own brain.
Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.
Montaigne said three hundred years ago, ‘Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.
In the lobby of the visitor center, the glass doors had been shattered, and a cold gray mist blew through the cavernous main hall. A sign that read WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH dangled from one hing...
In the 1980s, a few genetic engineering companies began to ask, What is the biological equivalent of a Sony Walkman? These
If you chart the gambler’s fortunes over time, what you find is the gambler wins for a period, or loses for a period. In other words, everything in the world goes in streaks. It’s a real phenomenon, a...
En cierto sentido, no estamos integrados más que por recuerdos. Nuestra personalidad se estructura a partir de recuerdos, nuestra vida está organizada en torno a recuerdos, nuestras culturas se erigen...
Can you tell me anything? It’s a bioengineering firm. Bioengineering, Barney said. Well, there’s the obvious … Which is? A DNA molecule. Oh, come on, Nedry said. Nobody could be analyzing a DNA molecu...
But now reporters came to the story with the lead fixed in their minds; they saw their job as proving what they already knew. They didn’t want information so much as evidence of villainy. In this mode...
Biography, observed Oscar Wilde, lends to death a new terror.
Because there haven’t been any advances, Malcolm said. Not really. Thirty thousand years ago; when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with...
Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way. Malcolm shook his head...
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.
All major changes are like death, he said. You can’t see to the other side until you are there. And he closed his eyes.