Many textbooks point out that no animal has evolved wheels and cite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem. But it is...

Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for...

Humanity stands … before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave...

I wondered whether water is a mirror for our darker emotions as much as it is an engine for our happiness. Water quiets all the noise, all the distractions, and connects you to your own...

We half-eat cookies and drink the milk, we leave notes, all so kids will believe in something that isn’t true. Kids try their best to scientifically determine whether Santa’s real and our whole culture feeds...

George Gey paid his way through a biology degree at the University of Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he could make nearly anything for cheap or free. During his second year...

Biot, who assisted Laplace in revising it [The Mécanique Céleste] for the press, says that Laplace himself was frequently unable to recover the details in the chain of reasoning, and if satisfied that the conclusions...

[Asteroids are] the vermin of the skies.[Asteroids can block objects of interest on astronomical photographs.]

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it’s not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That’s the point. The picture...

I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren’t going to stop me.

BOTANY, n. The science of vegetables –those that are not good to eat, as well as those that are. It deals largely with their flowers, which are commonly badly designed, inartistic in color, and ill-...

Her statistics were more than a study… For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed—and in all...

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous...

We need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.Yet, every decade, global consumption continues to increase relentlessly.

respond rather than react to situations, people or environment. Let go of limiting emotions such as fear, frustration and anger and start to express your emotions to others, this is essential to a healthy wellbeing.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden...

[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.

To live in modernity–an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news–is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason...

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 facts of nature simply...

He(Prophet Muhammad) laid the foundation of a universal government. His law was one for all. Equal justice and love for everyone.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any...

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and...

All the more recent work on alkaptonuria has… strengthened the belief that the homogentisic acid excreted is derived from tyrosine, but why alkaptonuric individuals pass the benzene ring of their tyrosine unbroken and how and...

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of...

Chloroplasts bear chlorophyll; they give the green world its color, and they carry out the business of photosynthesis. Around the inside perimeter of each gigantic cell trailed a continuous loop of these bright green dots....

The central ideas of Christianity — an angry God and vicarious atonement — are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present...

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed...

Science begs literature to develop wings.

In natural science the principles of truth ought to be confirmed by observation.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to...

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set...

The wolf reintroduction has gone so well that, somewhat ironically, the wolves are now threatened by their own success. Indeed, virtually all the conditions for strong public support that were evident in the early years...

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested...

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm,...

Wissenschaft ist Macht.

It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the...

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

Timmy has no intention of going on the trip. He has never been on a sightseeing tour before and according to him, he is never going on one, end of discussion. Who wants to see...

(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts,...

You spend months barely acknowledging someone’s existence and then BOOM, you’re emotionally addicted to her. Science would probably blame it on chemicals, genetics or something equally logical, but it didn’t feel like anything logical

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as...

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism…