Sciencey Quotes

Selected awesome quotes about science in general. New ones everyday guaranteed, or your money back! :) "Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off." (my non-sciencey blog)

[genericlatino-blog]

Evolutionary biology is treated unlike any science by both academics and the general public. For the average person, evolution is equivalent to natural selection, and because the concept of selection is easy to grasp, a reasonable understanding of comparative biology is often taken to be a license for evolutionary speculation. It has long been known that natural selection is just one of several mechanisms of evolutionary change, but the myth that all of evolution can be explained by adaptation continues to be perpetuated by our continued homage to Darwin’s treatise in the popular literature. For example, Dawkins’ agenda to spread the word on the awesome power of natural selection has been quite successful, but it has come at the expense of reference to any other mechanisms, a view that is in some ways profoundly misleading. There is, of course, a substantial difference between the popular literature and the knowledge base that has grown from a century of evolutionary research, but this distinction is often missed by nonevolutionary biologists.

Michael Lynch in The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. Published in PNAS (2007).

This is a very good paper, however my favorite part is in the conclusion,

This tone of dissent is not meant to be disrespectful.

Sure.

(via thenoobyorker)

[ludimagister-deactivated2017063]

The connectivity of the amygdala with the neocortex is not symmetrical. The amygdala projects back to the neocortex in a much stronger sense than the neocortex projects to the amygdala. … The implication is that the ability of the amygdala to control the cortex is greater than the ability of the cortex to control the amygdala. And this may explain why it’s so hard for us to will away anxiety; emotions, once they’re set into play, are very difficult to turn off. Hormones and other long-acting substances are released in the body during emotions. These return to the brain and tend to lock you into the state you’re in at the time. Once you’re in that state it’s very difficult for the cortex to find a way of working its way down to the amygdala and shutting it off.

Joseph Ledoux

[lovebuffalo]

In principle, we can know all of mathematics. It is given to us in its entirety and does not change. … That part of it of which we have a perfect view seems beautiful, suggesting harmony; that is that all the parts fit together although we see fragments of them only. … Mathematics is applied to the real world and has proved fruitful. This suggests that the mathematical parts and the empirical parts are in harmony and the real world is also beautiful.

Kurt Gödel, A Logical Journey

[explore-blog]

The greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way.

Intellectual impresario John Brockman, in the introduction to This Explains Everything – the latest Edge question, in which 192 thinkers each select the most elegant scientific explanation of how the world works.

[scienceyquotes-blog]

My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher 

[scienceyquotes-blog]

When I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

[scienceyquotes-blog]

But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.

Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish 

[arithmetical-design]

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion—not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a break-through idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it.

Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

[biowithdylan]

Right away, everyone wants to know what’s to be cut. Whatever you all settle on cutting, it should not be science. Investment in science is investment in innovation. New ideas are what keep the U.S. economy driving forward.

Bill Nye on Fiscal Cliffhanging, on the Huffington Post.

[scienceyquotes-blog]

The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.

António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain 

[sagansense]

Contemplated as one grand whole, astronomy is the most beautiful monument of the human mind; the noblest record of its intelligence. Seduced by the illusions of the senses, and of self-love, man considered himself, for a long time, as the centre of the motion of the celestial bodies, and his pride was justly punished by the vain terrors they inspired. The labour of many ages has at length withdrawn the veil which covered the system. Man appears, upon a small planet, almost imperceptible in the vast extent of the solar system, itself only an insensible point in the immensity of space. The sublime results to which this discovery has led may console him for the limited place assigned him in the universe.

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, System of the World, Part 1, Chapter 6 (1796)

[the-star-stuff-blog]

Hundreds of languages & religions manifest around the world. But in every place on Earth, the laws physics are the same.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 

[richardfeynman]

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

Richard Feynman

[sciencenote]

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954 

[kindofamenace-blog]

The people had to be educated and they had to practice their education and their skepticism, otherwise we don’t run the government, the government runs us.

Carl Sagan paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson in his last interview, 1996.

[thedailycosmos-deactivated20131]

Science is nothing more than a never-ending search for truth. What could be more profoundly sacred than that?

Ann Druyan

[scienceyquotes-blog]

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values