If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learn...
Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small crea...
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their...
History is also a hard taskmaster, for she covers her paths by erasing so much evidence from her records—
Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later g...
Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental. A 60 percent (or whatever) heritability for intelligenc...
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When...
Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case.
My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with aha -- while direct, abstract, learned ass...
Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of th...
But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can th...
Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosio...
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 mer...
Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes human judgement and ingenuity...