The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them,...

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called...

No one, in the world’s whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever...

We are all star stuff.

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

The tobacco control movement provides a good model for how to achieve massive societal changes. In 1965, over 50 percent of men and 34 percent of women smoked. By 2010, only 23.5 percent of men...

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: ‘he...

Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence....

Man is the interpreter of nature, science the right interpretation.

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying...

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone. … [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and...

Science, you don’t know, looks like magic.

When I started this trial, I thought we were going to try this case on science. I had no idea my client would be called a liar.

They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings...

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century...

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of...

As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra....

Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near. … Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon’s rising so high as might endanger its bursting....

The sea in all its vastness is its own, real world. Man is nature’s sci-fi.

Yes, I’m a materialist. I’m willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I’m unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders...

…only one man lived who could understand Gibbs’s papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.

I have been able to solve a few problems of mathematical physics on which the greatest mathematicians since Euler have struggled in vain … But the pride I might have held in my conclusions was...

We get a lot of calls where the person is murdered at home, but is not found for a period of time. And so the animals have already started to take the body apart because...

There is no science without spirituality; spirituality has no meaning without science.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery’s being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880’s, science played almost...

Will fluorine ever have practical applications?It is very difficult to answer this question. I may, however, say in all sincerity that I gave this subject little thought when I undertook my researches, and I believe...

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

I have always loved to begin with the facts, to observe them, to walk in the light of experiment and demonstrate as much as possible, and to discuss the results.

Facts, and facts alone, are the foundation of science… When one devotes oneself to experimental research it is in order to augment the sum of known facts, or to discover their mutual relations.

Then you get the wrong answer and you can’t go to the Moon that way! Nature isn’t a person, you can’t trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it’s...

The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its...

It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.

Do not try the parallels in that way: I know that way all along. I have measured that bottomless night, and all the light and all the joy of my life went out there.[Having himself...

Bir kişinin kendi insanlığının tam anlamıyla bilincinde olması, Terence’in dediği gibi, “Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto” (Ben bir insanım, insansal olan hiçbir şey bana yabancı değildir), kavramının, herkesin insanlığa ait her şeyi...

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of...

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how...

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for ‘[intelligent] design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn’t working very well!

There’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don’t think...

Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

Except they kept asking me questions like ‘What is your biggest source of conflict about the Pope?’ Or ‘Has the Pope ever tried to suppress your scientific work?’ Completely out of left field!”They didn’t want...

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn’t see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December...

The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.

Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is...

The future science of government should be called ‘la cybernétique’ (1843){Coining the French word to mean ‘the art of governing,’ from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Wiener...

King Solomon’s Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with...