We preach and practice brotherhood — not only of man but of all living beings — not on Sundays only but on all the days of the week. We believe in the law of universal...

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent expression of ‘the survival of the fittest.’ This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is,...

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil....

Scientific physiology has the task of determining the functions of the animal body and deriving them as a necessary consequence from its elementary conditions.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

I’m frequently asked, “Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so...

To be able to see into a friends’ dream is a dream in itself.-Doctor Kōsaku Tokita (Paprika)

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. … Choose science.

Of course the theologians fought the facts found by the geologists, the scientists, and sought to sustain the sacred Scriptures. They mistook the bones of the mastodon for those of human beings, and by them...

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are...

We commissioned additional tests on more samples of the stem cells featured on the 2004 Science article.

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis,...

I took a glass retort, capable of containing eight ounces of water, and distilled fuming spirit of nitre according to the usual method. In the beginning the acid passed over red, then it became colourless,...

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher...

As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation....

Wilson (1975) defines biological communication relatively broadly as ‘the action on the part of one organism (or cell) that alters the probability pattern of behavior in another organism (or cell) in a fashion adaptive to...

Today everybody admits that something is wrong with the world, and the critics of Christianity are the very people who feel this most. The most violent attacks on religion come from those who are most...

The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is...

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

I don’t think there’s anything man wasn’t meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn’t do.

In truth, ideas and principles are independent of men; the application of them and their illustration is man’s duty and merit. The time will come when the author of a view shall be set aside,...

The exact science of one molecule transformed into another — that Mabel could not explain, but then again she couldn’t explain how a fetus formed in the womb, cells becoming beating heart and hoping soul....

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.

Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but it is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent; since a part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a...

Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy (‘love of wisdom’) is simply a tool depending on how one uses it,...

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

In Paley’s famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that...

DNA has memory!

Luck is not some esoteric, godlike phenomenon. Luck is countable but undefinable. Luck easily can be explained as number of factors acting in a favour of a person. These factors’ behaviour could be statistically proved...

Did the Abrahamic God know that, by “divinely inspiring” the book of Genesis and other tales in the Bible, that He would cause millions to impede scientific understandings of our origins and push for myth...

One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark...

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is...

En un mot, pour tirer la loi de l’expérience, if faut généraliser; c’est une nécessité qui s’impose à l’observateur le plus circonspect.In one word, to draw the rule from experience, one must generalize; this is...

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them....

Indeed, not all attacks—especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin—are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it… But it...

This (…) had made me aware for the first time of the well-disguised myth that they and the academic institutions they represent are bastions of a free exchange of ideas. They are -but only of...

The evolution of higher and of lower forms of life is as well and as soundly established as the eternal hills. It has long since ceased to be a theory; it is a law of...

[Pure research] is worth every penny it costs.

Through the judicious employment of symbols, diagrams, and calculations, mathematics enables us to acquire significant facts about extremely significant things (universal laws, even), not by first forging out into the cosmos with teams of scientists,...

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements...

Evolution on the large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

You dont love science if someone just talks to you for 45 minutes a day,

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

I confess that Fermat’s Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, for a multitude of such theorems can easily be set up, which one could neither prove nor disprove. But I...