Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I watched the coral reefs that I studied as a student vanish in the blink of an eye, and for decades I wrote and spoke of ocean obituaries. But big scary problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action.
The scientific analysis that is supposed to provide our Governor the facts and information he needs to make a crucial decision was crafted with the guidance of the gas industry, not of the state's scientists.
I'm at a slightly higher risk for type 2 diabetes, and my grandmother had diabetes. My hemoglobin a1c, which is one of the measures, started being a little high when I was drinking a ton of that coconut water.
Genius as an explosive power beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes.
What you need to learn how to do is analyze situations and do differential diagnoses and understand the principle and the concepts rather than learn all the details, and medical school doesn't begin to do that.
A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.
Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world.
Let us have "sweet girl graduates" by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the "golden hair" will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within.
Needless fear and panic over disease and misfortune that seldom materialize are simply bad habits. By proper ventilation and illumination of the mind it is possible to cultivate tolerance, poise and real courage.
Although each egg cell produced by a woman carries a single X chromosome, the sperm cells produced by a man carry either an X or a Y. This means, in very simple terms, that the sperm cell determines a baby's sex.
The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them, is that of the determination of man's place in nature and his relation to the cosmos.
What men need is, as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning .
Wall Street was sort of at the height of the fame, everyone thought it was really cool, and I think taking that job, doing something probably more for the money was probably the worst thing I think I've ever done.
There are a number of attributes of species and populations that are not of any particular selective advantage to any single individual in a population but that are of great advantage to the population as a whole.
While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good than to evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced.
Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
I hope that Los Altos is one of the first cities to have self-driving cars, and if that's true, well, awesome, because there's a lot of parking lots that we could get rid of and use for parks. That would be amazing!
We don't know nearly enough about the complexities of Nature. If we think we can eliminate natural ecosystems and substitute prosthetic devices, i.e. clean air or water with fusion energy - we are kidding ourselves.
I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play...but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.
It is unlikely that changes in telomeres are influencing the lifespan of the worm. That is because telomeres only shorten when cells divide. Most of the cells of the worm stop dividing when the worm becomes an adult.
I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.
An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
We humans have a tendency to see ourselves as completely different from other animals, and the way in which large segments of the public continue to reject the theory of evolution is just one symptom of that malaise.
We're looking for something that sounds like a member of the Republican Party. The reality is, he's playing for the Democratic vote at this point ... but he has to give something to create energy among conservatives.
Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.
If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired thatwhich could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.
Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it... Eliminate one species, and another increases to take its place. Eliminate a great many species, and the local ecosystem starts to decay.
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
What I have tried to show is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe.
To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary; and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.
Even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.
I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life.
What does gene A do? What does gene B do? What does it do in different contexts? What's its importance? We know the answer to that for a very small number of genes, the ones that made themselves evident many years ago.
And pigs may fly. And we may be able to terraform and send surface populations to Mars. And Jesus may come next week anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. All these crazy things run through people's minds.
Sstudying ants just quickly became part of me because I was allowed to wander, explore and find things and figure things out myself. And I saw how much was there and what could be done and how I could make a life of it.
We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept.
If materialism is true, it seems to me that we cannot know that it is true. If my opinions are the result of the chemical processes going on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry, not those of logic.
America's got a Darwin problem - and it matters. According to a 2009 Gallup poll taken on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, fewer than 40% of Americans are willing to say that they 'believe in evolution.'
To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.
It's like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, 'Why isn't this human getting old?'... But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.
Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."
The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty.
Whatever part of the animal fabric whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison the result would be the same the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.
Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes.
The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.