Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The f...
Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run.
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
In Darwins post-platonische werelds is de variatie de fundamentele werkelijkheid en veranderen berekende gemiddelden in abstracties. We blijven echter de voorkeur geven aan het oudere en tegengestelde...
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in t...
Duke est desipere in loco [it is pleasant to act foolishly from time to time—a line from Horace].
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size,...
I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.
I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.
Self-deception as the preliminary to public deception is almost automatic. —WALTER LIPPMANN,
Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information it is a creative human activity.
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.
Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many...
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identifie...