Biologists from the United States

"The behavior of two individuals, consisting of effort which results in output, is considered to be determined by a satisfaction function which depends on remuneration (receiving part of the output) and on the effort expended. The total output of the two individuals is not additive, that is, together they produce in general more than separately. Each individual behaves in a way which he considers will maximize his satisfaction function. Conditions are deduced for a certain relative equilibrium and for the stability of this equilibrium, i.e., conditions under which it will not “pay” the individual to decrease his efforts. In the absence of such conditions "exploitation" occurs which may or may not lead to total parasitism."

"The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net."

"Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables."

"No map contains all the information about the territory it represents. The road map we get at the gasoline station may show all the roads in the state, but it will not as a rule show latitude and longitude. A physical map goes into details about the topography of a country but is indifferent to political boundaries. Furthermore, the scale of the map makes a big difference. The smaller the scale the less features will be shown."

"A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps."

"[It is a] well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals"

"It is misleading in a crucial way to view information as something that can be poured into an empty vessel, like a fluid or even energy."

"The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible."

"The predictions of physical theories for the most part concern situations where initial conditions can be precisely specified. If such initial conditions are not found in nature, they can be arranged. Such arrangements are considerably easier to realize with inanimate than with animate matter, because the properties of animate matter are much more sensitive to being tampered with than inanimate matter. In particular, living tissue in vitro may behave quite differently than in situ. Controlled biological experiments are, of course, possible, but they are more difficult and their scope is more limited than that of physical experiments. For this reason, biology has had to depend to a greater extent than physics on theories of larger speculative scope, in which reasoning by imaginative analogy plays a more important role."

"A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other propositions"

"There are two suffixes in our language (and similar ones in other European languages) which suggest organized knowledge. One is the venerable, academic "ology," that reminds one of university curricula and scholarship. The other is the energetic and somewhat mysterious "ics," which has a connotative flavor of magic. Where "ology" suggests academic isolation (ichthyology, philology) "ics" suggests a method of attack on life's problems. It contains a faint throwback to the ancient dreams of the philosopher's stone and of "keys" to the riddles of the universe. Ancient words ending in "ics" are mathematics and metaphysics. Of more recent origin are economics, statistics, semantics, and cybernetics."

"Who Are the Semanticists? To answer this question, let us go to the writings of those who make frequent references to semantics or to equivalent terms which have to do with the study of meaning. We find that a number of prominent thinkers have occupied themselves with this study. In England these include Whitehead, Russell, Ogden, Richards, Ayer, and others; in Austria (later scattered, fleeing from fascism), a group of writers who called themselves the Vienna Circle, which included Carnap and Frank (now in in the United States), Wittgenstein (now in England), and Neurath (deceased); the United States is represented by Charles Morris, and Poland by Tarski and Korzybski (deceased), both of whom emigrated to the United States."

"For a general semanticist, communication is not merely words in proper order properly inflected (as for the grammarian) or assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician) or assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all these together, with the chain of 'fact to nervous system to language to nervous system to action."

""What is good in Korzybski's work," they say, "is not new, and what is new is not good." On the other hand, many "Korzybski-ites" proclaim that Korzybski's work has "nothing to do" with semantics. They go so far as to say that the very term "general semantics" was an unfortunate choice; that had Korzybski known what confusion would arise between semantics and general semantics he would not have used it at all. Korzybski himself has maintained that while semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to empirical science: that it is the foundation of a science of man, the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever achieved."

"The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics ... Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'."

"If Korzybski cannot be said to have established an empirical science, what then has he done? He has pointed a way toward the establishment of such a science. He was a precursor of an intellectual revolution which is just now beginning and which promises to match that of the Renaissance. If Korzybski is seen in this role, then the question of his originality or erudition is not important. He might have something of a dilettante in him. He might have pretended to have more specialized knowledge than he actually had. Great portions of his outlook might be found in the works of more modest and more meticulous workers, That is not important. He was a man of vision and an apostle. Such men are all too rare in our age of specialization."

"The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision."

"In the case of strategy and conscience, I am not sure. Here I believe, is essential incompatibility, not merely a result of misunderstanding. I do not believe one can bring both into focus. One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion."

"The military forces of the revolutionary adversary are diffuse. One is never sure whether one has destroyed them unless one is ready to destroy a large portion of the population, and this usually conflicts with the political aim of the war and hence also violates a fundamental Clausewitzian principle"

"There are different levels of organization in the occurrence of events. You cannot explain the events of one level in terms of the events of another. For example, you cannot explain life in terms of mechanical concepts, nor society in terms of individual psychology. Analysis can only take you down the scale of organization. It cannot reveal the workings of things on a higher level. To some extent the holistic philosophers are right."

"It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple."

"The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow"."

"It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict."

"In a game, the potentialities and evaluations of alternative outcomes must be taken into account, if the reactions of the opponents to each other's moves are to moves are to be understood or described systematically."

"Conflict... is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love. In the vast output of discourse on the subject, conflict has been treated in every conceivable way. It has been treated descriptively, as in history and fiction; it has been treated in an aura of moral approval, as in epos; with implicit resignation, as in tragedy; with moral disapproval, as in pacifistic religions. There is a body of knowledge called military science, presumably concerned with strategies of armed conflict. There are innumerable handbooks, which teach how to play specific games of strategy. Psychoanalysts are investigating the genesis of "fight-like" situations within the individual, and social psychologists are doing the same on the level of groups and social classes."

"At present game theory has, in my opinion, two important uses, neither of them related to games nor to conflict directly. First, game theory stimulates us to think about conflict in a novel way. Second, game theory leads to some genuine impasses, that is, to situations where its axiomatic base is shown to be insufficient for dealing even theoretically with certain types of conflict situations... Thus, the impact is made on our thinking process themselves, rather than on the actual content of our knowledge."

"We live in an age of belief-belief in the omnipotence of science. This belief is bolstered by the fact that the problems scientists are called on to solve are for the most part selected by the scientists themselves."

"A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist."

"Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life."

"Although the drama of games of strategy is strongly linked with the psychological aspects of the conflict, game theory is not concerned with these aspects. Game theory, so to speak, plays the board. It is concerned only with the logical aspects of strategy."

"Whether game theory leads to clear-cut solutions, to vague solutions, or to impasses, it does achieve one thing. In bringing techniques of logical and mathematical analysis gives men an opportunity to bring conflicts up from the level of fights, where the intellect is beclouded by passions, to the level of games, where the intellect has a chance to operate."

"Many psychologists, sociologists and especially anthropologists and psychiatrists raise serious objections against routine attempts to "extend the methods of the physical sciences" to the study of man. These objections cannot be dismissed simply on the grounds that they are not constructive; for inherent in the objections may well be a conviction that there can never be a "behavioral science" as scientists understand science. Whether there can be such a science or not will be decided neither by citing successful applications of "scientific method" to carefully circumscribed sectors of human behavior nor by pointing out what has not yet been done. Therefore on the question of whether a can in principle be constructed, we shall take no sides. That some kinds of human behavior can be described and even predicted in terms of objectively verifiable and quantifiable data seems to us to have been established."

"Crisis in its simplest terms is defined as an upset in a steady state... the habitual problem-solving activities are not adequate and do not rapidly lead to the previously achieved balance state."

"The usefulness of the models in constructing a testable theory of the process is severely limited by the quickly increasing number of parameters which must be estimated in order to compare the predictions of the models with empirical results."

"Our first objective in undertaking the experimental program described here has been to gain some understanding of what goes on in long sequences of plays of Prisoner's Dilemma. We have attempted to gain this understanding by postulating a system going through a sequence of states and by attempting to formulate some mathematical models from which the dynamics of the system could be deduced. Once such a model is found, its parameters, properly interpreted, become the key terms in the emerging psychological theory. This strategy can be deemed successful, if the parameters so discovered are independent of the process itself, if they suggest further investigation, and if the further investigations, in turn, lead to a more inclusive theory."

"(Game theory is) essentially a structural theory. It uncovers the logical structure of a great variety of conflict situations and describes this structure in mathematical terms. Sometimes the logical structure of a conflict situation admits rational decisions; sometimes it does not."

"We must admit that it is extremely difficult to formulate a theory sufficiently general to encompass all possible sufficient causes of wars. With regard to necessary causes, however,... it is weapons. Without weapons wars could not be fought. We are told that, deprived of weapons, people would still fight with sticks and stones. This, however, need not concern us. We are concerned not just with fighting but with the sort of mass insanity that can destroy the entire civilization, the product of millenia of accumulated effort, in a matter of hours. And this can be done only with real, up-to-date weapons, not sticks and stones."

"[Education] seems to be the only hope: to spread enlightenment sufficiently wide so that people can no longer be manipulated to give consent to policies that will surely eventually lead to their own destruction."

"The American Revolution was ignited by the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’, a slogan suggested by democratic ideals... Ought not the present day version of the old slogan be ‘No annihilation without representation?"

"To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us."

"Centralization of society's vital services in giant computer centers, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, air- traffic control centers, 100-story skyscrapers, and government compounds increases its vulnerability. ... choosing his targets, today's saboteur could pollute a city's water supply, dynamite power transmission towers, cripple an airport control center, destroy a corporate or government computer center."

"The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality."

"The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation."

"In the US. Infantry Manual published during World War II, the soldier was told what to do if a live grenade fell into the trench where he and others were sitting: to wrap himself around the grenade so as to at least save the others. (If no one "volunteered," all would be killed, and there were only a few seconds to decide who would be the hero.)"

"Anatol Rapoport is a pioneer and lead-figure of the systems sciences, studies in conflict & cooperation, and peace research. He is professor emeritus of Psychology and Mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada... Rapoport has spearheaded many scientific innovations, including the application of mathematical methods, first to Biology and later to the Social Sciences. Moreover, he is one of the rare thinkers who have contributed significantly to "marrying" philosophy and science. The originality and rigor of his thinking make his theoretical oeuvre extraordinarily resourceful, as well as unique in its ethical substance and esthetical appeal. Rapoport operates from a multidimensional background of experience and studies (see the following C.V.), embodying a deep humanistic commitment (cf. Rapoport 1994), and a profoundly systemic thinking."

"The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod's legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent's work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism."

"There is presumably an upper limit to the carrying capacity of humans on earth—of the numbers that agriculture can support—and that number is usually estimated at between 13-15 billion, though some people think the ultimate numbers might be much higher. (2001)"

"At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record. But stasis was conveniently dropped as a feature of life's history to he reckoned with in evolutionary biology. And stasis had continued to be ignored until Gould and I showed that such stability is a real aspect of life's history which must be confronted-and that, in fact, it posed no fundamental threat to the basic notion of evolution itself. For that was Darwin's problem: to establish the plausibility of the very idea of evolution, Darwin felt that he had to undermine the older (and ultimately biblically based) doctrine of species fixity. Stasis, to Darwin, was an ugly inconvenience."

"Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals... very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity."

"Although Haldane accepted the earlier and incorrect paleontological interpretation of the fossil record of Gryphaea, in his overall belief that the pace of evolution was rapid and seemingly discontinuous, rather than slow and continuous, he anticipated, at least in part and by three decades, the model of punctuated equilibria, which was proposed by... Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould."

"According to Gould and Eldredge, the reason why so many links are missing is that they simply do not exist. They take the view that biological evolution proceeds in successive stages of "punctuated equilibrium." Living species would remain unchanged for extremely long stretches of time, and then undergo profound changes in relatively short periods. To borrow a term from the quantum theory of atoms, evolution would occur in "quantum jumps." It is very likely that the spark of life appeared during the first such "jump.""

"The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity."

"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex."

"The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species."

"Some scientists hesitate to continue in a given field of research as soon as its application becomes apparent. This refusal to apply knowledge when it exists seems to us, however, to be as unrealistic as the attempt to apply knowledge before it exists. (page 8)"

"With the right of the scientist to investigate most aspects of the material universe, most persons will agree; but there are some who have questioned the applicability of scientific methods to an investigation of human sexual behavior....It is as though the dietician and biochemist were denied the right to analyze foods and the processes of nutrition, because the cooking and proper serving of food may be rated a fine art, and because the eating of certain foods has been considered a matter for religious regulation. (page 8)."

"There is an honesty in science which demands that the best means be used for the determination of truth. Certainly there are many sorts of truth in the universe, and many aspects of truth must be taken into account if man is to live most effectively in the social organization to which he belongs. But in regard to matter---the stuff of which both non-living materials and living organisms are made---scientists believe that there is no better way of obtaining information than that provided by human sense organs. No theory, no philosophy, no body of theology, no political expediency, no wishful thinking, can provide a satisfactory substitute for the observation of material objects and of the way in which they behave. (page 9)."

"There is an honesty in science which leads to a certain acceptance of reality. There are some who, finding the ocean an impediment to the pursuit of their designs, try to ignore its existence. If they are unable to ignore it because of its size, they try to legislate it out of existence, or try to dry it up with a sponge. They insist that the latter operation would be possible if enough sponges were available, and if enough persons would wield them. There is no ocean of greater magnitude than the sexual function, and there are those who believe that we would do better if we ignored its existence, that we should not try to understand its material origins, and that if we sufficiently ignore it and mop at the flood of sexual activity with new laws, heavier penalties, more pronouncements, and greater intolerances, we may ultimately eliminate the reality. (page 10)."

"It cannot be too frequently emphasized that the behavior of any animal must depend upon on the nature of the stimulus which it meets, its anatomic and physiologic capacities, and its background of previous experience. Unless it has been conditioned by previous experience, an animal should respond identically to identical stimuli, whether they emanate from some part of its own body, from another individual of the same sex, or from an individual of the opposite sex."

"The inherent physiologic capacity of an animal to respond to any sufficient stimulus seems, then, the basic explanation of the fact that some individuals respond to stimuli originating in other individuals of their own sex-and it appears to indicate that every individual could so respond if the opportunity offered and one were not conditioned against making such responses. There is no need of hypothesizing peculiar hormonal factors that make certain individuals especially liable to engage in homosexual activity, and we know of no data which prove the existence of hormonal factors (p. 758). There are no sufficient data to show that specific hereditary factors are involved. Theories of childhood attachments to one or the other parent, theories of fixation at some infantile level of sexual development, interpretations of homosexuality as neurotic or psychopathic behavior or moral degeneracy, and other philosophic interpretations are not supported by scientific research, and are contrary to the specific data on our series of female and male histories."

"The impression that infra-human mammals more or less confine themselves to heterosexual activities is a distortion of the fact which appears to have originated in a man-made philosophy, rather than in specific observations of mammalian behavior. Biologists and psychologists who have accepted the doctrine that the only natural function of sex is reproduction, have simply ignored the existence of sexual activity which is not reproductive. They have assumed that heterosexual responses are a part of an animal's innate, "instinctive" equipment, and that all other types of sexual activity represent "perversions" of the "normal instincts". Such interpretations are, however, mystical. They do not originate in our knowledge of the physiology of sexual response (Chapter 15), and can be maintained only if one assumes that sexual function is in some fashion divorced from the physiologic processes which control other functions of the animal body."

"The mammalian record thus confirms our statement that any animal which is not too strongly conditioned by some special sort of experience is capable of responding to any adequate stimulus. This is what we find in the more uninhibited segments of our human species, and this is what we find among young children who are not too rigorously restrained in their early sex play. Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity."

"At the risk of being repetitious, I would remind the group that we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group which, in general, most frequently uses contraceptives."

"A nuclear-power plant is infinitely safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food every year."

"Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle."

"If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000"

"In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialize, and exploit every last bit of the planet—a trend that would inevitably lead to a collapse of the life-support systems upon which civilization depends."

"Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people."

"A series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly grimmer…. The ozone hole… acid rain…. Three hundred million people have starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines weren’t as large as agriculturists thought they would be… due to the spread of… Green Revolution technology into the poor countries…. What makes us nervous right now is that we’re faced with again having to do something desperate to increase our food production greatly.... In 1965 we knew exactly how to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough—Today we have nothing left to deploy—that’s very scary.... As a species we’re not able to live on our income; we’re living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural soils are being destroyed, water is being overpumped, and our biodiversity, our life support system—we’re already far beyond what we can support."

"The debate regarding which individual factor, among the three key factors producing the environmental crisis, causes more damage - the size of the human population on the planet, excessive consumption of resources or unequal/ unjust distribution of resources among countries [the wealthier countries consume much more resources than poorer countries] - is like a debate about which contributes more to a triangle, the base or the ribs of the triangle. You can not separate the three factors. If we analyze the numbers over a relatively longer time interval, we will conclude that the size of the population has a bigger impact than consumption. On the other hand, consumption and unequal distribution are also important aspects. If we do not change these three factors all at the same time, the quality of our life will change dramatically. Today humanity is delivering a serious blow to nature, but it is clear that nature will deliver the final blow."

"If everyone consumed resources at the US level – which is what the world aspires to – you will need another four or five Earths."

"As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’."

"To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men. I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable."

"The evidence we have is that toxics reduce the intelligence of children, and members of the first heavily influenced generation are now adults. The first empirical evidence we are dumbing down Homo sapiens were the – and the resultant . On the other hand, toxification may solve the population problem, since sperm counts are plunging."

"Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources."

"Life has now entered a . This is probably the most serious environmental problem, because the loss of a species is permanent, each of them playing a greater or lesser role in the living systems on which we all depend . The species extinctions that define the current crisis are, in turn, based on the massive disappearance of their component populations, mostly since the 1800s. The massive losses that we are experiencing are being caused, directly or indirectly, by the activities of Homo sapiens. They have almost all occurred since our ancestors developed agriculture, some 11,000 y ago. At that time, we numbered about 1 million people worldwide; now there are 7.7 billion of us, and our numbers are still rapidly growing. As our numbers have grown, humanity has come to pose an unprecedented threat to the vast majority of its living companions."

"Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation - it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals - not consuming more junk."

"The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic.... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything.... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else.... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland.... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources.... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably.... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality."

"Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality—But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control."

"Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water."

"The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated."

"The American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened the loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of an aeroplane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove ten, or twenty, or fifty, and at some point there will be a catastrophic failure and the plane will fall from the sky. Insects are the rivets that keep ecosystems functioning...In Paul Ehrlich's analogy we may be close to the point where the wings fall off."

"The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher… Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate."

"Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher."

"You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery."

"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."

"It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privileged world" and "the forgotten world". The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace."

"I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot."

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they would be crying out for tractors, and fertilizer, and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

"That's ridiculous. This shouldn't even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have--the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues--and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests. At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There's a lot of nonsense going on here."

"If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it's up to them to make that foolish decision. But there's absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it's better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive."

"Some credit him with saving more human lives than any other person in history."

"I don't know exactly what you guys want to do, but let me tell you why you should do it with fruit flies."

"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science."

"The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction."

"Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."

"We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow."

"The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics."

"Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening."

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."

"Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows."

"If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces."

"To many of us, this sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest of bird life, is sufficient cause for sharp regret. To those who have never known such rewarding enjoyment of nature, there should yet remain a nagging and insistent question: If this "rain of death" has produced so disastrous an effect on birds, what of other lives, including our own?"

"In our modern world nothing may be taken for granted-not even the spring songs that herald the return of the birds."

"I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives."

"Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life."

"The problem I dealt with in Silent Spring is not an isolated one. The excessive and ill-advised use of chemical pesticides is merely one part of a sorry whole-the reckless pollution of our living world with harmful and dangerous substances. Until very recently, the average citizen assumed that "someone" was looking after these matters and that some little understood but confidently relied upon safeguards stood like shields between his person and any harm. Now he has experienced, from several different directions, a rather rude shattering of these beliefs."

"I believe that only in that atmosphere of intellectual freedom can we solve the problems before us now."

"To me, Dr. Albert Schweitzer is the one truly great individuals our modern times have produced."

"As I look back through history I find a parallel. I ask you to recall the uproar that followed Charles Darwin's announcement of his theories of evolution. The concept of man's origin from pre-existing forms was hotly and emotionally denied, and the denials came not only from the lay public but from Darwin's peers in science. Only after many years did the concepts set forth in The Origin of Species become firmly established. Today, it would be hard to find any person of education who would deny the facts of evolution. Yet so many of us deny the obvious corollary: that man is affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species to which he is related by evolutionary ties."

"Fishes and plankton, whales and squids, birds and sea turtles, all are linked by unbreakable ties to certain kinds of water—to warm water or cold water, to clear or turbid water, to water rich in phosphates or in silicates."

"The sharpest peaks of the Ridge are the cluster of islets known as the Rocks of St. Paul, near the equator. The entire cluster of half a dozen islets is not more than a quarter of a mile across, and their rocky slopes drop off at so sheer an angle that water more than half a mile deep lies only a few feet off shore."

"The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth."

"The 1950's have comprised an exciting decade in the science of the sea. During this period a manned vehicle has descended to the deepest hole in the ocean floor. During the 'fifties, also, the crossing of the entire Arctic basin was accomplished by submarines traveling under the ice. Many new features of the unseen floor of the sea have been described, including new mountain ranges that now appear to be linked with others to form the longest and mightiest mountains of the earth-a continuous chain encircling the globe. Deep, hidden rivers in the sea, subsurface currents with the volume of a thousand Mississippis, have been found. During the International Geophysical Year, 60 ships from 40 nations, as well as hundreds of stations on islands and seacoasts, co-operated in an enormously fruitful study of the sea."

"Although man's record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man's ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naive. In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem-what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed in all the earth's history, the by-products of atomic fission. The stark problem that faces him is whether he can dispose of these lethal substances without rendering the earth uninhabitable. No account of the sea today is complete unless it takes note of this ominous problem. By its very vastness and its seeming remoteness, the sea has invited the attention of those who have the problem of disposal, and with very little discussion and almost no public notice, at least until the late 'fifties, the sea has been selected as a "natural" burying place for the contaminated rubbish and other "low-level wastes" of the Atomic Age."

"The truth is that disposal has proceeded far more rapidly than our knowledge justifies. To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time."

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."

"F or the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures. It has been described as 'a savings bank for solar energy, receiving deposits in seasons of excessive insolation and paying them back in seasons of want. Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature."

"Day by day and season by season, the ocean dominates the world's climate."

"In our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate."

"Activities in the nonhuman world also reflect the warming of the Arctic-the changed habits and migrations of many fishes, birds, land mammals, and whales."

"The fifteen years that I spent in fishery and wildlife conservation work with the *Government have taken me into certain places where few other women have been."

"Tradition is important in the Government, but fortunately I had conspirators who were willing to help me shatter precedent. But among my male colleagues who had to sign the papers, the thought of one woman on a ship with some fifty men was unthinkable. After much soul searching, it was decided that maybe two women would be all right, so I arranged with a friend, who was also a writer, to go with me."

"There is something deeply impressive about the night sea as one experiences it from a small vessel far from land. When I stood on the afterdeck on those dark nights, on a tiny man-made island of wood and steel, dimly seeing the great shapes of waves that rolled about us, I think I was conscious as never before that ours is a water world, dominated by the immensity of the sea...."

"There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life-we are never bored. We can't be. There is always something new to be investigated. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one..."

"The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for the scientists. They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top-or the sea-or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed."

"I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth."

"As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life."

"Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity."

"I believe it is important for women to realize that the world of today threatens to destroy much of that beauty that has immense power to bring us a healing release from tension. Women have a greater intuitive understanding of such things. They want for their children not only physical health but mental and spiritual health as well. I bring these things to your attention tonight because I think your awareness of them will help, whether you are practicing journalists, or teachers, or librarians, or housewives and mothers."

"We see the destructive trend on a national scale in proposals to invade the national parks with commercial schemes such as the building of power dams. The parks were placed in trust for all the people, to preserve for them just such recreational and spiritual values as I have mentioned. Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty-and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar."

"A preoccupation with the wonder and beauty of the earth has strongly influenced the course of my life."

"There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

"Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy-no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials."

"This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits."

"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species-man-acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible."

"Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time."

"The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped-500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience."

"Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides.""

"It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray. All this has been risked-for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction?"

"It is a sobering fact...that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb."

"Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity."

"Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?"

"It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potential for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem."

"Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life."

"It is an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts."

"Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song."

"These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes — nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil — all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides.""

"For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology."

"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one "less traveled by"-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make."

"To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view."

"If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our "right to know," and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us."

"Now at last, as it has become apparent that the heedless and unrestrained use of chemicals is a greater menace to ourselves than to the targets, the river which is the science of biotic control flows again, fed by new streams of thought."

"Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life-with living populations and all their pressures and counter-pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves. The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life-a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper."

"The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth."

"Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature; now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune-it may well be our final tragedy-that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself."

"Measured against the vast backdrop of geologic time, the whole era of man seems but a moment-but how portentous a moment!"

"Who could have foretold that this being, who walked upright and no longer lived in trees, who lurked in caves, hiding in fear from the great beasts who shared his world-who could have guessed that he would one day have in his hands the power to change the very nature of the earth-the of life and death over so many of its creatures? Who could have foretold that the brain that was developing behind those heavy brow ridges would allow him to accomplish things no other creature had achieved-but would not at the same time endow him with wisdom so to control his activities that he would not bring destruction upon himself?"

"Only a few centuries have passed since those pre-Columbian days, yet today our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars, but like the Norsemen and the Polynesians of old, lured by the very challenge of the unknown."

"In the western world our thinking has for many centuries been dominated by the Jewish-Christian concept of man's relation to nature, in which man is regarded as the master of all the earth's inhabitants. Out of this there easily grew the thought that everything on earth-animate or inanimate, animal, vegetable, or mineral-and indeed the earth itself-had been created expressly for man."

"But I am not certain that in spite of all our modern learning and sophistication, we have actually progressed far beyond the self-oriented philosophy of the Victorians. I fear that these ideas still lurk about, showing themselves boldly and openly at times, at oth-ers skulking about in the shadows of the subconscious."

"We still talk in terms of "conquest"-whether it be of the insect world or of the mysterious world of space. We still have not become mature enough to see ourselves as a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe, a universe that is distinguished above all else by a mysterious and wonderful unity that we flout at our peril."

"Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge."

"Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important, simply because of his new-found power to destroy it."

"I clearly remember that in the days before Hiroshima I used to wonder whether nature-nature in the broadest context of the word-actually needed protection from man. Surely the sea was inviolate and forever beyond man's power to change it. Surely the vast cycles by which water is drawn up into the clouds to return again to the earth could never be touched. And just as surely the vast tides of life-the migrating birds-would continue to ebb and flow over the continents, marking the passage of the seasons. But I was wrong. Even these things, that seemed to belong to the eternal verities, are not only threatened but have already felt the destroying hand of man."

"Our streams are fouled with an incredible assortment of wastes-domestic, chemical, radioactive, so that our planet, though dominated by seas that envelop three-fourths of its surface, is rapidly becoming a thirsty world."

"So nature does indeed need protection from man; but man, too, needs protection from his own acts, for he is part of the living world. His war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. His heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth, and in time return to him."

"What we are today represents an adjustment achieved over the millions and hundreds of millions of years."

"the distinguishing feature of man's activities is that they have almost always been undertaken from the narrow viewpoint of short-range gain, without considering either their impact on the earth or their long-range effect upon ourselves. They have been distinguished, also, by a curious unwillingness to be guided by the knowledge that is available in certain areas of science. I mean especially the knowledge of biologists, of ecologists, of geneticists, all of whom have special areas of competence that should allow them to predict the effect of our actions on living creatures, including, of course, man himself."

"This is an age that has produced floods of how-to-do-it books, and it is also an age of how-to-do-it science. It is, in other words, the age of technology, in which if we know how to do something, we do it without pausing to inquire whether we should."

"We know how to split the atom, and how to use its energy in peace and war, and so we proceed with preparations to do so, as if acting under some blind compulsion;"

"Instead of always trying to impose our will on Nature we should sometimes be quiet and listen to what she has to tell us. If we did so I am sure we would gain a new perspective on our own feverish lives. We might even see the folly and the madness of a world in which half of mankind is busily preparing to destroy the other half and to reduce our whole planet to radioactive ashes in the doing."

"But the stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. Your generation must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and a sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery-not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny. "In today already walks tomorrow.""

"After describing in detail the adverse reactions to Silent Spring of the farm bureaus in two Pennsylvania counties, the reporter continued: "No one in either county farm office who was talked to today had read the book, but all disapproved of it heartily.""

"I criticize the present methods because they are based on a rather low level of scientific thinking. We are capable of much greater sophistication in our solution of the problem."

"I would like to say that in Silent Spring I have never asked the reader to take my word. I have given him a very clear indication of my sources. I make it possible for him-indeed I invite him-to go beyond what I report and get the full picture. This is the reason for the 55 pages of references. You cannot do this if you are trying to conceal or distort or to present half truths."

"A penetrating observer of social problems has pointed out recently that whereas wealthy families once were the chief benefactors of the universities, now industry has taken over this role. Support of education is something no one quarrels with-but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides."

"We see scientific societies acknowledging as "sustaining associates" a dozen or more giants of a related industry. When the scientific organization speaks, whose voice do we hear-that of science? or of the sustaining industry? It might be a less serious situation if this voice were always clearly identified, but the public assumes it is hearing the voice of science."

"What does it mean when we see a committee set up to make a supposedly impartial review of a situation, and then discover that the committee is affiliated with the very industry whose profits are at stake?"

"All of these things raise the question of the communication of scientific knowledge to the public. Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through?"

"here the tailoring-the screening of basic truth is done, not to suit a party line-but to accommodate to the short-term gain-to serve the gods of profit and production."

"Through your interest in plant life, your fostering of beauty, your alignment with constructive conservation causes, you promote that onward flow of life that is the essence of our world. This is a time when forces of a very different nature too often prevail-forces careless of life or deliberately destructive of it and of the essential web of living relationships."

"The battle for a sane policy for controlling unwanted species will be a long and difficult one. The publication of Silent Spring was neither the beginning nor the end of that struggle."

"The most hopeful sign is an awakening of strong public interest and concern. People are beginning to ask questions and to insist upon proper answers instead of meekly acquiescing in whatever spraying programs are proposed. This in itself is a wholesome thing."

"Above all, we must not be deceived by the enormous stream of propaganda that is issuing from the pesticide manufacturers and from industry-related-although ostensibly independent organizations."

"we are engaged in a grim experiment never before attempted. We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth and-unless we change our methods-will continue through the lifetime of those now living. No one knows what the result will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us."

"What happens, then, when the public interest is pitted against large commercial interests? Those organizations wishing to plead for protection of the public interest do so under the peril of losing the tax-exempt status so necessary to their existence. The industry wishing to pursue its course without legal restraint is now actually subsidized in its efforts."

"The way is not made easy for those who would defend the public interest"

"There are other disturbing factors ... One is the growing interrelations between professional organizations and industry, and between science and industry."

"Another cause of concern is the increasing size and number of industry grants to the universities. On first thought, much support of education seems desirable, but on reflection we see that this does not make for unbiased research-it does not promote a truly scientific spirit. To an increasing extent, the man who commands the largest expense account-and who brings the largest grants to his university becomes an untouchable, with whom even the University president and trustees do not argue."

"As you listen to the present controversy about pesticides, I recommend that you ask yourself-Who speaks? And Why?"

"For we all are united in a common cause. It is a proud cause, which we may serve secure in the knowledge that the earth will be better for our efforts. It is a cause that has no end: there is no point at which we shall say, "Our work is finished." We build on the achievements of those who have gone before us; let us, in turn, build strong foundations for those who will take up the work when we must lay it down."

"Over the decades and the centuries, the scenes and the actors change. Yet the central theme remains-the greed and the shortsightedness of the few who would deprive the many of their rightful heritage. It is a theme supported by the false assurances that whatever is financially profitable is good for the nation and for mankind. These assurances were offered in the days of the timber barons and the land grabbers; they are heard today."

"If the crisis that now confronts us is even more urgent than those of the early years of the century-and I believe it is this is because of wholly new factors peculiar to our own time. These are, first of all, the phenomenal growth of the human population, threatening to over-run its own environment in a way that can bring only deep concern to thoughtful students of population problems. The second factor is a corollary of the first: that as people and their demands increase, there is a smaller share of the earth's resources for each of us to use and enjoy. There is less clean water, less uncontaminated air; there are fewer forests, fewer unspoiled wilderness areas. The third reason is the introduction of new and dangerous contaminants into soil, water, air, and the bodies of plants and animals as our new technology spreads its poisons and its discarded wastes over the land."

"we live in a time when change comes rapidly-a time when much of that change is, at least for long periods, irrevocable. This is what makes our own task so urgent. It is not often that a generation is challenged, as we today are challenged. For what we fail to do-what we let go by default, can perhaps never be done."

"I take courage, however, in the fact that the conservation effort has a broader base than ever before. There is more organized effort; there are many more individuals who are conscious of conservation problems and who are striving, in their own communities or on the national scene, to solve these problems."

"The contamination of the environment with harmful substances is one of the major problems of modern life. The world of air and water and soil supports not only the hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants, it supports man himself. In the past we have often chosen to ignore this fact. Now we are receiving sharp reminders that our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves."

"We have acquired technical skills on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. We can do dramatic things and we can do them quickly; by the time damaging side effects are apparent it is often too late, or impossible, to reverse our actions."

"I should also like to see legislation, possibly at the state level, restricting the sale and use of pesticides at least to those capable of understanding the hazards and of following directions. To me it is shocking that these chemicals can be bought and applied by illiterate and even by mentally deficient persons. We place much more stringent restrictions on the sale of drugs which at least are not sprayed from powerful machines!"

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

"I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."

"A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods. I always thought so myself; the Maine woods never seem so fresh and alive as in wet weather. Then all the needles on the evergreens wear a sheath of silver; ferns seem to have grown to almost tropical lushness and every leaf has its edging of crystal drops. Strangely colored fungi — mustard-yellow and apricot and scarlet — are pushing out of the leaf mold and all the lichens and the mosses have come alive with green and silver freshness."

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

"I shall have to express a very deep conviction: that until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is—whether its victim is human or animal—we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity."

"All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort. (1954)"

"And so it is--we always think our problems are peculiar to us, and then finally discover how many others have gone through exactly the same thing. And much as I suffer during the writing itself, I begin to think it is easy for me compared with the agonies she relates! (1955)"

"She knew how to explain science to ordinary readers in a way that they could understand; she knew also that if you don't love a thing you won't save it, and her love for the natural world shines through everything she wrote."

"I certainly was unaware that the ocean globally was on the verge of cataclysmic decline, that the pristine seas I had known as a child were in danger of becoming Paradise Lost. I was not alone in not knowing. Rachel Carson, famous for her 1962 classic Silent Spring, 11 years earlier wrote in The Sea Around Us: "Eventually man...found his way back to the sea.... And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.""

"There is a long-standing debate within the environmental movement about its historical origins. Some point to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's seminal book Silent Spring and accounts of the first Earth Day in 1970. Depending on the author, either of these two events is hailed as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. With her groundbreaking book, Rachel Carson alerted postwar America about the unintended consequences of the chemical industry on the natural world-and inevitably humans-leading to the banning of DDT in the US."

"what is driving these declines? In 1962, three years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become. Insect-rich wildlife habitats such as hay meadows, marshes, heathland and tropical rainforests have been bulldozed, burned or ploughed to destruction on a vast scale. Soils have been degraded and rivers choked with silt and polluted with industrial and agricultural chemicals or drained dry from over-use. The problems with pesticides and fertilizers that Carson highlighted have become far more acute, with an estimated 3 million tonnes of pesticides now going into the global environment every year. In the US, the weight of pesticides applied has increased by 150 per cent since Silent Spring was published, while at the same time new pesticides have been introduced that are much more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson's day. For example, the neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid is now the most widely used insecticide in the world, despite an EU-wide ban since 2018 brought on because of the harm it does to bees. Imidacloprid is about 7,000 times more toxic to bees than the insecticide DDT which was widely used in the 1960s and '70s. On top of all these pressures, wild insects now must cope with climate change, a phenomenon unrecognized in Carson's time."

"She was born in 1907 in the boom of the Industrial Age about 18 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, in the town of Springdale. From her bedroom window, she could see smoke billow from the stacks of the American Glue Factory, which slaughtered horses. The factory, the junkyard of its time, was located less than a mile away, down the gently sloping riverbank from the Carsons' four-room log cabin. Passers-by could watch old horses file up a covered wooden ramp to their death."

"Robin Wall Kimmerer says she admires Carson as a pioneering female scientist and one who “combined her knowledge with a sense of responsibility for that knowledge.”"

"It was Rachel Carson down in the dirt with DDT-contaminated worms. It was vividly descriptive prose, naturalist sketches, and, eventually, documentary photography and film seeking to awaken and inspire love for specific creatures and places-and, by extension, for creatures and places like them all over the world."

"I. F. Stone may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today's standards, the environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals. Galvanized by the 1962 publication of Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (the Deepwater Horizon disaster of its day), they launched a new kind of North American environmentalism, one far more confrontational than the gentlemen's conservationism of the past. In addition to the newly formed Friends of the Earth (created in 1969) and Greenpeace (launched in 1971), the movement also included groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, then an idealistic gang of scrappy scientists and lawyers determined to heed Rachel Carson's warnings. The group's unofficial slogan was, "Sue the bastards," and so they did. The EDF fought for and filed the original lawsuit that led to the U.S. ban on DDT as an insecticide, resulting in the revival of many species of birds, including the bald eagle."

"If we were adding CO₂ to the air more slowly, geophysical processes, like the weathering of rock, would come into play to counteract acidification. As it is, things are moving too fast for such slow-acting forces to keep up. As Rachel Carson once observed, referring to a very different but at the same time profoundly similar problem: "Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.""

"Certainly humans can be destructive and shortsighted; they can also be forward-thinking and altruistic. Time and time again, people have demonstrated that they care about what Rachel Carson called "the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures," and that they're willing to make sacrifices on those creatures' behalf. Alfred Newton described the slaughter that was occurring along the British coast; the result was the Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds. John Muir wrote about the damage being done in the mountains of California, and this led to the creation of Yosemite National Park. Silent Spring exposed the dangers posed by synthetic pesticides, and within a decade, most uses of DDT had been prohibited."

"With Silent Spring's appearance in 1962, Rachel Carson, the quiet and unassuming writer and marine biologist, made Americans think about their dependence on nature. Pesticide manufacturers, long seen as helping to control nature, raged at her attack. They assaulted Carson's book and also criticized her scientific facts and her character, called her a "hysterical woman.""

"Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is a seminal work of environmental justice thought. A female scientist writing in the early 1960s, Carson described the impact of pesticides on birdlife and the eco-system, offering an early shift in Western scientific thinking toward recognition that the earth is a living system, one in which human shortsightedness has consequences. This text informed many environmental activists, who organized the first Earth Day actions and instigated establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. It also informed early environmental justice activists, who began to make a connection between chemical contamination and public health in communities along the fencelines of hazardous waste disposal and production sites."

"I was deeply impressed by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It may well be the book by which the human race will stand or fall."

"Forty years ago, Silent Spring delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness and, as a result, infused the environmental movement with new substance and meaning...It was Rachel Carson's achievement to synthesize this knowledge into a single image that everyone, scientists and the general public alike, could easily understand...We are still poisoning the air and water and eroding the biosphere, albeit less so than if Rachel Carson had not written. Today we understand better than ever why we must press the effort to save the environment all the way home, true to the mind and spirit of the valiant author of Silent Spring."

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"The race to make discoveries of the greatest generality, to solve the major problems in the 'mainstream of biology,' does not strike me as the best research strategy to teach to students. It results in an implosive convergence of effort on a few subjects, in a sharp decline in the number of discoveries per man per unit time, and in frustration on the part of young scientists who realize too late that their own professors have picked up the best pebbles on the beach."

"[Biology has] become the paramount science, exceeding other disciplines, including physics and chemistry at least, in the creative tumult of its disciplines and disputations. [...] I'll also be so bold at this point to suggest that we are now at the edge of establishing the two fundamental laws of biology: The first law is that all of the phenomena of biology, the entities and the processes, are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. Not immediately reducible to them, but ultimately consistent and in consilience with them, by a cause and effect explanation. The second law is that all biological phenomena, these entities and processes that define life itself, have arisen by evolution through natural selection."

"This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century."

"My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’,”"

"Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)"

"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."

"Will we solve the crises of next hundred years? asked Krulwich. “Yes, if we are honest and smart,” said Wilson. “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.” Until we understand ourselves, concluded the Pulitzer-prize winning author of On Human Nature, “until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally,” we’re on very thin ground."

"The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that had ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another 100 years like that."

"We have stone age emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology."

"In the process of natural selection, then. any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species."

"Samuel Butler's famous aphorism that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."

"The key to the sociobiology of mammals is milk."

"Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized."

"The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have."

"God remains a viable hypothesis as the prime mover, however undefinable and untestable that conception may be."

"We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity."

"The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute."

"Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences."

"The mosquito is an automaton. It can afford to be nothing else."

"The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits."

"The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible."

"The three extreme kinds of schizophrenia are unmistakable: the haunted paranoid surrounded by his imaginary community of spies and assassins, the clownish, sometimes incontinent hebephrenic, and the frozen catatonic."

"Although the capacity to become schizophrenic may well be within all of us, there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them to the condition."

"Evidence has... been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies. ...and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers."

"There is no such thing as a typically "schizophrenogenic" (schizophrenia-producing) family arrangement, one most likely to produce a mentally ill adult from a child with the potential for the disease."

"The central idea of the philosophy of behaviorism, that behavior and the mind have an entirely materialist basis subject to experimental analysis, is fundamentally sound."

"Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception "genetic epistemology," in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding."

"The rules followed are tight enough to produce a broad overlap in the decisions taken by all individuals and hence a convergence powerful enough to be labelled human nature."

"Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain."

"We can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution."

"In early history phobias might have provided the extra margin needed to insure survival..."

"The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning."

"We seem to be able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled as members versus nonmembers."

"Because of mathematical indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate, and in this sense eliminate free will."

"The cardinal mystery of neurobiology is not self-love or dreams of immortality but intentionality. What is the prime mover, the weaver who guides the flashing shuttles?"

"A schema is a configuration within the brain, either inborn or learned, against which the input of the nerve cells is compared. ...the conscious mind ...can fill in details that are missing from the actual sensory input and create a pattern in the mind which is not necessarily present in reality. In this way, the gestalt of objects—the impression...—is aided by the taxonomic powers of the schemata."

"Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence."

"Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow."

"Because it is... far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change."

"Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior."

"The only other mammalian carnivores that take outsized prey are lions, hyenas, wolves, and African wild dogs. Each... has an exceptionally advanced social life, prominently featuring the pursuit of prey in coordinated packs."

"Primitive men are ecological analogs of lions, wolves, and hyenas... they have adopted pack hunting in the pursuit of big game. ...habitually slaughtering surplus prey, storing food, feeding solid food to their young, dividing labor, practicing cannibalism, and interacting aggressively with competing species. ...this way of life persisted for millions of years or longer and was abandoned in most societies only during the last few thousand years."

"The selection pressures of hunter-gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human evolution."

"The increase in brain size and refinement of stone artifacts point to an unbroken advance in mental ability over the last two or three million years. ...No organ in the history of life has grown faster."

"The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back to the time of the Roman Empire."

"The emergence of civilization has everywhere followed a definable sequence."

"At the apogee of the state's evolution, architecture was monumental, and the ruling class were exalted as a pseudospecies. The sacred rites of statehood became the central focus of religion."

"Nationalism and racism, to take two examples, are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism."

"Daily life is a compromised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence."

"Early human beings... filled a special ecological niche: they were carnivorous primates of the African plains. ...When agriculture permitted the increase of population density, game was no longer abundant... carnivorism remained a basic dietary impulse, with cultural aftereffects that varied according to the special conditions of the environment in which the society evolved."

"Ancient Mexico, like most forest-invested New World tropics, was deficient in the kind of large game that flourished on the plains of Africa and Asia. ...The situation was partially relieved by cannibalizing the victims of human sacrifice. ...The [ Aztec ] priesthood... sanctified it... immediately after their hearts had been cut out, the victims were systematically butchered like animals and their parts distributed and eaten."

"I interpret contemporary human social behavior to comprise hypertrophic outgrowths of the simpler features of human nature joined together into an irregular mosaic."

"The fraction of Americans working in occupations concerned primarily with information has increased from 20 to nearly 50 percent of the work force."

"Pure knowledge is the ultimate emancipator. It equalizes people and sovereign states, erodes the archaic barriers of superstition and promises to lift the trajectory of cultural evolution. But I do not believe that it can change the ground rules of human behavior or alter the main course of history's predictable trajectory."

"Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms."

"Are human beings innately aggressive? ...The answer to it is yes. ...Only by redefining the words "innateness" and "aggression" to the point of uselessness might we correctly say that human aggressiveness is not innate."

"The most peaceable tribes of today were often ravagers of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and murderers in the future."

"Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment."

"Animals use aggression as a technique for gaining control over necessities... that are scarce or are likely to become so... They intensify their threats and attack with increasing frequency as the population around them grow. As a result the behavior itself induces members of the population to spread out in space, raises the death rate, and lowers the birth rate. In such cases aggression is said to be a "density-dependent factor" in controlling population growth."

"If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plant and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere."

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."

"True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety."

"The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised."

"Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false."

"If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth."

"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another."

"Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So 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."

"Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history."

"Stable climates with muted seasons allow more kinds of organisms to specialize on narrower pieces of the environment, to outcompete the generalists around them, and so persist for longer periods of time. Species are packed more tightly. No niche, it seems goes unfilled. Specialization is likely to be pushed to bizarre, beautiful extremes."

"The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us."

"The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry."

"To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively."

"Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages."

"Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy."

"The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper."

"To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science."

"For the first time in history a conviction has developed among those who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large for safety and comfort. Fresh water is growing short, the atmosphere and the seas are increasingly polluted as a result of what has transpired on the land. The climate is changing in ways unfavorable to life, except for microbes, jellyfish and fungi. For many species it is already fatal."

"If we choose the path of destruction, the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves."

"The biology of extinction is not a pleasant subject. The death of a species is especially disheartening to the scientists who study endangered and newly extinct species. Together these vanishing remnants of Earth's biodiversity test the reach and quality of human morality. Species brought low by our hand now deserve our constant attention and care."

"Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph."

"His critics accuse him of a reductionist and mechanistic view of culture and morality, with dangerous eugenic and racist overtones, while his admirers claim that his work is Darwinian in scope and that... he is the target of philistines who object to his conclusions on ethical and emotional, rather than scientific, grounds."

"Wilson himself argued that it would be in the best interest of humanity if organized religions as we know them would disappear. There is, however, a misunderstanding. Wilson was not an atheist, nor was he against asking religious questions. Since his main interest were ants, it is to his interesting we should turn to understand more about his ideas on religion."

"Religion, Wilson theorizes, is so prevalent because it provided a definite evolutionary advantage for those early humans who adopted it. ...when our apelike ancestors gradually became more intelligent, individuals could rationally begin to question the power of their leader. ...a dangerous, dissipative force on the tribe. ...Thus, according to Wilson, a selective pressure was placed on intelligent apes to suspend reason and blindly obey the leader and his myths..."

"You see, if E. O. Wilson says that Indian scientists should do taxonomy, now of course, someone will say that you are preventing them from doing the sort of high science that is done elsewhere. So it should not come from there, it should come from us. I think that we must recognize where we have the advantages and where we have the disadvantages."

"Recently, E.O. Wilson's sociobiology has offered the traditionalist view on gender in an argument which applies Darwinian ideas of natural selection to human behavior. Wilson and his followers reason that human behaviors which are "adaptive" for group survival become encoded in the genes, and they include in these behavjors such complex traits as altruism, loyalty, and maternalism. They not only reason that groups practicing a sex-based division of labor in which women function as child-rearers and nurturers have an evolutionary advantage, but they claim such behavior somehow becomes part of our genetic heritage, in that the necessary psychological and physical propensities for such societal arrangements are selectively developed and genetically selected. Mothering is not only a socially assigned role but one fitting women's physical and psychological needs. Here, once again, biological determinism becomes prescriptive, in fact a political defense of the status quo in scientific language. Feminist critics have revealed the circular reasoning, absence of evidence and unscientific assumptions of Wilsonian sociobiology. From the point of view of the nonscientist, the most obvious fallacy of sociobiologists is their ahistoricity in disregarding the fact that modern men and women do not live in a state of nature. The history of civilization describes the process by which humans have distanced themselves from nature by inventing and perfecting culture. Traditionalists ignore technological changes, which have made it possible to bottle-feed infants safely and raise them to adulthood with caretakers other than their own mothers. They ignore the implications of changing life spans and changing life cycles. Until communal hygiene and modern medical knowledge cut infant mortality to a level where parents could reasonably expect each child born to them to live to adulthood, women did indeed have to bear many children in order for a few of them to survive. Similarly, longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality altered the life cycles of both men and women. These developments were connected with industrialization and occurred in Western civilization (for whites) toward the end of the nineteenth century, occurring later for the poor and for minorities due to the uneven distribution of health and social services. Whereas up to 1870 child-rearing and marriage were co-terminus-that is, one or both parents could expect to die before the youngest child reached adulthood-in modern American society husbands and wives can expect to live together for twelve years after their youngest child has reached adulthood, and women can expect to outlive their husbands by seven years." Nevertheless, traditionalists expect women to follow the same roles and occupations that were functional and species-essential in the Neolithic."

"Specifically, sociobiology entails using explanatory principles and empirical findings derived from evolutionary biology to describe and explain social behavior among animals, including humans. It also draws on and incorporates thinking and research in ecology, especially behavioral ecology. The contributions of biologists such as R. A. Fisher, W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and George Williams were foundational for the development and emergence of sociobiology, and that emergence culminated with the publication of Sociobiology: The Modern Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson in 1975. This chapter explores the impact of sociobiology on theory and research in sociology during the nearly four decades since the publication of Wilson’s opus. Wilson’s book is a tome, stretching to twenty-seven chapters and 697 pages of text. Had it not been for the fact that the title and subject of Chapter 27 was “Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology,” it might have been recorded in the annals of science as a magisterial synthesis of much of what was then known about the evolution of social behavior in animals, but its influence may not have extended much beyond a few other fields such as biological anthropology or comparative psychology. But by expanding the scope of his analysis to include humans, Wilson provoked one of the great intellectual and scientific debates of the late twentieth century and helped stimulate the development of entirely new programs of research in the social and behavioral sciences."

"Wilson clearly laid down a radical biosociological research programme, claiming that sociology should be reduced to biology. This idea has profoundly influenced sociobiology and its reception in the larger public. Because of his claims to 'biologicize' culture and even ethics and the changes in evolutionary biology, which he at least co-provoked, sociobiology was soon singled out for criticism. But this challenge to other subject areas also inspired interesting new theories for instance in psychology or in philosophy."

"Since 1978, when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural genetics by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But irrationality must soon recede. It will soon be possible to read individual genetic messages at costs which will not bankrupt our health systems. In so doing, I hope we see whether changes in DNA sequence, not environmental influences, result in behaviour differences. Finally, we should be able to establish the relative importance of nature as opposed to nurture."

"The virgin fertility of our soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a curse than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East or West."

"More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us."

"I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour and every moment of our lives, if we will only tune in and remain so."

"Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth."

"I do not feel capable of writing a single word of counsel to those dear young people, more than to say that my heart goes out to every one of them, regardless of the fact that I have never seen them and may never do so. I want them to find Jesus, and make Him a daily, hourly, and momently part of themselves. O how I want them to get the fullest measure of happiness and success out of life. I want them to see the Great Creator in the smallest and apparently the most insignificant things about them. How I long for each one to walk and talk with the Great Creator through the things he has created. How I thank God every day that I can walk and talk with Him."

"My beloved friend, keep your hand in that of the Master, walk daily by His side, so that you may lead others into the realms of true happiness, where a religion of hate, (which poisons both body and soul) will be unknown, having in its place the "Golden Rule" way, which is the "Jesus Way" of life, will reign supreme. Then, we can walk and talk with Jesus momentarily, because we will be attuned to His will and wishes, thus making the Creation story of the world non-debatable as to its reality. God, my beloved friend is infinite the highest embodiment of love. We are finite, surrounded and often filled with hate. We can only understand the infinite as we loose the finite and take on the infinite."

"I know that my Redeemer lives. Thank God I love humanity, complexion doesn't interest me one single a bit."

"When our thoughts — which bring actions — are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be."

"Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you."

"My attitude toward life was also my attitude toward science. Jesus said one must be born again, must become as a little child. He must let no laziness, no fear, no stubbornness keep him from his duty. If he were born again he would see life from such a plane he would have the energy not to be impeded in his duty by these various sidetrackers and inhibitions. My work, my life, must be in the spirit of a little child seeking only to know the truth and follow it. My purpose alone must be God's purpose - to increase the welfare and happiness of His people. Nature will not permit a vacuum. It will be filled with something. Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill... With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum and I became an agent. Then the passage, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me," came to have real meaning. As I worked on projects which fulfilled a real human need forces were working through me which amazed me. I would often go to sleep with an apparently insoluble problem. When I woke the answer was there. Why, then, should we who believe in Christ be so surprised at what God can do with a willing man in a laboratory? Some things must be baffling to the critic who has never been born again."

"It is necessary for our generation to repudiate Carver and all the lesser-known black leaders who cooperated with the white design to keep their people down. We need none of their kind today. Someday, when, God willing, the struggle is over and its bitterness has faded, those men and women may be rediscovered and given their just due for working, as best they could see to do in their time and place, for their brothers and sisters. But at present their influence is pernicious, and where they still control education, in the North or the South, they must be replaced with educators who are ready to demand full equality for the oppressed races and fight for it at any cost."

"Professor Carver, who teaches scientific agriculture, botany, agricultural chemistry, etc., at Tuskegee, is, as regards complexion and features, an absolute Negro; but in the cut of his clothes, the accent of his speech, the soundness of his science, he might be professor of botany, not at Tuskegee, but at Oxford or Cambridge. Any European botanist of distinction, after ten minutes' conversation with this man, instinctively would treat him as a man on a level with himself."

"He is better known as the greatest Negro scientist alive, the man who pioneered new uses for Southern agricultural products, developed 285 new uses for the peanut, got 118 products, including vinegar, molasses and shoe blacking, from the South’s surplus sweet potatoes."

"The versatility of his genius and his achievements in diverse branches of the arts and sciences were truly amazing. The versatility of his genius All mankind is the beneficiary of his discoveries in the field of agricultural chemistry. The things which he achieved in the face of early handicaps will for all time afford an inspiration of youth everywhere. The things, which he achieved in the face of early handicaps, will for all time afford an inspiration of youth everywhere. I count it a great privilege to have met Dr. Carver and to have talked with him at Tuskegee on the occasion of my visit to the institute, which was the scene of his long and distinguished labors."

"From oppressive and crippling surroundings, George Washington Carver lifted his searching, creative mind to the ordinary peanut, and found therein extraordinary possibilities for goods and products unthinkable by minds of the past."

"From crippling circumstance, George Washington Carver made for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of science."

"Although a few refer to George Washington Carver, whose research in agricultural products helped to revive the economy of the South when the throne of King Cotton began to totter, they ignore the contribution of Norbert Rillieux, whose invention of an evaporating pan revolutionized the process of sugar refining. How many people know that the multimillion-dollar United Shoe Machinery Company developed from the shoe-lasting machine invented in the last century by a Negro from Dutch Guiana, Jan Matzeliger, or that Granville T. Woods, an expert in electric motors, whose many patents speeded the growth and improvement of the railroads at the beginning of this century, was a Negro?"

"When Dr. Carver died, the United States lost one of her finest Christian gentleman. He was a good friend of my father and mother and I had known him for forty-seven years. To the world, he was known as a scientist. Those who knew him best, however, realized that this outstanding characteristic was a strong feeling of the eminence of God. Everything he was and did found its origin in that strong ans continuous feeling."

"From Carver's small laboratory at Tuskegee came formulas in agricultural chemistry that enriched the entire Southland, indeed the whole of America and the world."

"The scientific discoveries and experiments of Dr. Carver have done more to alleviate the one-crop agricultural system in the South than any other thing that has been done in the history of the United States."

"[He] achieved a place as one of the foremost scientists of all the world for all time."

"Dr. Carver left a legacy of hope and beacon light pointing to opportunities of the future... This Negro scientist who was born of slave parents succeeded by hard work and exalted vision to the stature of one of the most outstanding agricultural research scientists in the world.""

"Dr. George Washington Carver was one of the wonders of this age... Those who believe and teach that a man's heritage determines his spiritual, mental and physical traits will be hard put to explain the source of Dr. Carver's amazing intellect."

"If we were asked what living man had the worst start and the best finish, we would say, Dr. Carver. It's a great loss to us that we have no one like him in England."

"His work was his life, and by not diluting it with wrathful forays against the ignorance of prejudice he was able to make his own unique and most vital contribution to racial amity."

"Professor Carver, like the other men I have mentioned, is of unmixed African blood, and is one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race with whom I am acquainted. Whenever anyone who takes a scientific interest in cotton. Whenever any one who takes a scientific interest in cotton growing, or in the natural history of this part of the world, comes to visit Tuskegee, he invariably seeks out and consults Professor Carver."

"Although Professor Carver impresses every one who meets him with the extent of his knowledge in the matter of plant life, he is quite the most modest man I have ever met."

"Darwin's] triumph has won for us a common height from which we see the whole world of living beings as well as all inorganic nature; phenomena of every order we now regard as expressions of natural causes. The supernatural has no longer a standing is science; it has vanished like a dream, and the halls consecrated to its thraldom of the intellect are becoming radiant with a more cheerful faith."

"These are the faces of children I embraced and kissed and loved. I cannot imagine that they are dead, that none would survive... A million and a half children among the six million... But this I knew... I wanted to save their faces, not their ashes."

"I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business... Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism."

"Even before the concentration camps, I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world which might cease to exist."

"Concentration camp money... It was a German sadism that invented it. Can you do anything with it? Yes, you can cry."

"The Jews of the shtetls that Tolstoy remembered were saints... the people I photographed were saints. So now, in 1983, I tell the world: When you learn about Goethe, don't forget to study the Holocaust, too."

"...can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms?"

"Nature, God, or whatever you want to call the creator of the universe comes through the microscope clearly and strongly"

"The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator."

"You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms."

"[The Jews who roamed through Moscow looking for work] had a special kind of face ... a special kind of whisper and a special kind of footstep ... They were like hunted animals."

"My friends assured me that Hitler’s talk was sheer bombast,” Vishniac said in 1955. “But I replied that he would not hesitate to exterminate those people when he got around to it. And who was there to defend them? I knew I could be of little help, but I decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve — in pictures, at least — a world that might soon cease to exist."

"Vishniac came back from his trips... with a collection of photographs that has become an important historical document, for it gives us a last minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of the Nazi brutality exterminated them. Vishniac took with him on this self-imposed assignment... a rare depth of understanding and a native son's warmth and love for his people. ~ Edward Steichen, ex-director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 1950s."

"[his scientific accomplishments] were overshadowed by the photographs he took of Jews in prewar Eastern Europe and in Nazi Berlin. -- Shepard, Richard"

"Those images have proved to be an extraordinary record, made with forebodings of misfortune, that bring alive the flavor of the shtetl, of a Jewish peasant tending geese in the Carpathian Mountains, of tumbledown shacks in the Jewish quarter of Lublin, Poland, of Jewish patriarchs, in long caftans and wearing the furry hat called a shtreimel, trudging through the snow. -- Shepard, Richard"

"I met him in 1966, and discovered how undiscovered he was. -- Cornell Capa"

"[His photography was a] guiding force for visual interpretation [of Schindler's List]."

"[Roman Vishniac is] the official mortuary photographer of Eastern European Jewry. -- Leon Wieseltier, editor of The New Republic"

"“No one who hasn’t tried it can comprehend the careful planning, the diabolical perseverance and the incredible skill it takes to obtain the [photomicroscopic] results he gets,” the magazine quoted Philippe Halsman, former president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, as saying of Vishniac. “The man is a special kind of genius.”"

"In addition to his charisma and obvious talents, he was also known to possess what Howard Greenberg, Vishniac’s longtime gallerist, identified as “one of the bigger egos on the planet.”"

"I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world."

"Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans."

"We have already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than us — the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, stuff them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitat. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitat. Any advanced extraterrestrials who discovered us would surely treat us in the same way...If there really are any radio civilizations within listening distance of us, then for heaven's sake let's turn off our own transmitters and try to escape detection, or we are doomed."

"Just as strawberries are adapted to birds, so acorns are adapted to squirrels, mangos to bats, and some sedges to ants. That fulfills part of our definition of plant domestication, as the genetic modification of an ancestral plant in ways that make it more useful to consumers. But no one would seriously describe this evolutionary process as domestication, because birds and bats and other animal consumers don't fulfill the other part of the definition: they don't consciously grow plants."

"White blood cells and other cells of ours actively seek out and kill foreign microbes. The specific antibodies that we gradually build up against a particular microbe infecting us make us less likely to get reinfected once we become cured. As we all know from experience, there are some illnesses, such as flu and the common cold, to which our resistance is only temporary; we can eventually contract the illness again. Against other illnesses, though—including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox — our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That's the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe."

"Technological advances seem to come disproportionately from a few very rare geniuses, such as Johannes Gutenberg, James Watt, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers. They were Europeans, or descendants of European emigrants to America. So were Archimedes and other rare geniuses of ancient times. Could such geniuses have equally well been born in Tasmania or Namibia? Does the history of technology depend on nothing more than accidents of the birthplaces of a few inventors?"

"The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others."

"Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable. Yet the compression brings a compensating benefit: long-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies."

"The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans."

"How can we explain simultaneously this general pattern of female parental care and also its numerous exceptions? The answer comes from the realization that genes for behavior, as well as for malaria resistance and teeth, are subject to natural selection."

"In particular, while natural selection favors both males and females that leave many offspring, the best strategy for doing so may be different for fathers and mothers. That generates a built-in conflict between the parents, a conclusion that all too many humans don’t need scientists to reveal to them. We make jokes about the battle of the sexes, but the battle is neither a joke nor an aberrant accident of how individual fathers or mothers behave on particular occasions. It is indeed perfectly true that behavior that is in a male’s genetic interests may not necessarily be in the interests of his female co-parent, and vice versa. That cruel fact is one of the fundamental causes of human misery."

"Though seemingly remote from human sexuality, shorebird sexuality is instructive because it illustrates the main message of this book: a species’ sexuality is molded by other aspects of the species’ biology. It’s easier for us to acknowledge this conclusion about shorebirds, to which we don’t apply moral standards, than about ourselves."

"Our sex is ultimately laid down by our genes."

"Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

"Behavior evolves through natural selection, just as anatomy does. Hence if sex is enjoyable, natural selection must have been responsible for that outcome."

"Physiologists and molecular biologists regularly fall into the trap of overlooking this distinction, which is fundamental to biology, history, and human behavior. Physiology and molecular biology can do no more than identify proximate mechanisms; only evolutionary biology can provide ultimate causal explanations."

"History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency."

"People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!""

"Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives."

"[..] the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs."

"Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent cause of disastrous behaviour. [...] The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense [...] It appears to me that much of the rigid opposition to environmental concerns in the First World nowadays involves values acquired early in life and never again reexamined [...]."

"My views may seem to ignore a moral imperative that businesses should follow virtuous principles, whether or not it is most profitable for them to do so. Instead I prefer to recognize that, throughout human history, [...] government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be necessary for the enforcement of moral principles. Invocation of moral principles is a necessary first step for eliciting virtuous behavior, but that alone is not a sufficient step."

"Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practising behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices."

"Those numbers may not sound like a big deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age."

"Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability."

""The environment has to be balanced against the economy." This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed."

"In fact, one of the main lesson to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. [...] The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources. On reflection, it's no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks."

"If the Easter Islanders couldn't solve their milder local problems in the past, how can the modern world hope to solve its big global problems? People who get depressed at such thoughts often then ask me, “Jared, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the world’s future?” I answer, “I am a cautious optimist.” By that, I mean that, on the one hand, I acknowledge the seriousness of the problems facing us. If we don’t make a determined effort to solve them, and if we don’t succeed at that effort, the world as a whole within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse. That’s the reason why I decided to devote most of my career efforts at this stage of my life to convincing people that our problems have to be taken seriously and won’t go away otherwise. On the other hand, we shall be able to solve our problems – if we choose to do so."

"Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for grabs, lying in our own hands. We don’t need new technologies to solve our problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the most part we "just" need the political will to apply solutions already available."

"What are the choices that we must make if we are now to succeed, and not to fail? [...] Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial to tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives. One of those choices has depended on the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions. [...] The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? Which of these treasured values must instead be jettisoned and replaced with different approaches?"

"Remember that impact is the product of two factors: population multiplied times impact per person."

"My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference."

"As we shall see in this book's chapters, traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern industrial societies. [...] Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. [...] That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. [...] Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects [...] to the whole range of traditional societies."

"Perhaps we could benefit by selectively adopting some of those traditional practices. Some of us already do so, with demonstrated benefits to our health and happiness. In some respects we moderns are misfits; our bodies and our practices now face conditions different from those under which they evolved, and to which they became adapted. But we should also not go to the opposite extreme of romanticizing the past and longing for simpler times. Many traditional practices are ones that we can consider ourselves blessed to have discarded — such as infanticide, abandoning or killing elderly people, facing periodic risk of starvation, being at heightened risk from environmental dangers and infectious diseases, often seeing one’s children die, and living in constant fear of being attacked. Traditional societies may not only suggest to us some better living practices, but may also help us appreciate some advantages of our own society that we take for granted."

"The societies to which most readers of this book belong represent a narrow slice of human cultural diversity. Societies from that slice achieved world dominance not because of a general superiority, but for specific reasons: their technological, political, and military advantages derived from their early origins of agriculture, due in turn to their productive local wild domesticable plant and animal species. Despite those particular advantages, modern industrial societies didn’t also develop superior approaches to raising children, treating the elderly, settling disputes, avoiding non-communicable diseases, and other societal problems. Thousands of traditional societies developed a wide array of different approaches to those problems."

"The central principle of Fritz Bauer's career was that Germans should hold judgement upon themselves. That meant prosecuting ordinary Germans, not just the leaders whom the Allies had prosecuted. [...] The Nazi defendants being prosecuted by Bauer all tended to offer the same set of excuses [...]. Bauer's response, which he formulated again and again at the trials and in public, was as follows. Those Germans whom he was prosecuting were committing crimes against humanity. The laws of the Nazi state were illegitimate. One cannot defend one's actions by saying that one was obeying those laws. There is no law that can justify a crime against humanity. Everybody must have his own sense of right and wrong and must obey it, independently of what a state government says. Anyone who takes part in what Bauer called a murder machine [...] thereby becomes guilty of a crime."

"Guns, Germs, and Steel pushed geography as an academic discipline into the debates of economic historians in much the same way that Graeber intends for anthropology."

"The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful."

"As someone who's had the privilege of leading the human genome project, I've had the opportunity to study our own DNA instruction book at a level of detail that was never really possible before. It's also now been possible to compare our DNA with that of many other species. The evidence supporting the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor is truly overwhelming. I would not necessarily wish that to be so, as a Bible-believing Christian. But it is so. It does not serve faith well to try to deny that."

"There are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist."

"Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things."

""We'll get closer to perfect kids from caring families and good education than we'll ever get from genetics." 2005 National DNA Day Online Chatroom Transcript, https://www.genome.gov/DNADay/q.cfm?aid=5419&year=2005"

"Reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page."

"I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers."

"I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality."

"... God must also be an incredible physicist ... there is this phenomenal fine-tuning of the universe that makes complexity and, therefore, life possible."

"God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by God.(Evolution: The Fossils Say No, page 42)"

"Neither evolution nor creation qualifies as a scientific theory."

"Intelligent Design is Creationism."

"If we look at certain proteins, yes, man then -- it can be assumed that man is more closely related to a chimpanzee than other things. But on the other hand, if you look at other certain proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a bullfrog than he is a chimpanzee. If you focus your attention on other proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a chicken than he is to a chimpanzee." (Gish has repeatedly been challenged to support this claim, but has failed to do so: **Source)"

"Dr. Gish has always been fond of quoting Isaac Asimov as his authority on the Second Law. In our journal, Creation/Evolution, Issue VI, Dr. Asimov responded. He described Gish's treatment of the Second Law as being, and I quote, "on a kindergarten level.""

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid."

"I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family. Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee. Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

"Watson: But legalities aside, I think we must reevaluate our basic assumptions about the meaning of life. Perhaps, as my former colleague Francis Crick suggested, no one should be thought alive until about three days after birth."

"Prism: But how would society react to such a proposal?"

"Watson: Our society just hasn't faced up to this problem. In a primitive society, if you saw that a baby was deformed, you would abandon it on a hillside. Today this isn't permissible, and with our medicine getting better and better in the sense of being able to keep sick people alive longer, we are going to produce more people living wretched lives. I don't know how you get a society to change on such a basic issue; infanticide isn't regarded lightly by anyone. Fortunately, now through such techniques as amniocentesis, parents can often learn in advance whether their child will be normal and healthy or hopelessly deformed. They then can choose either to have the child or opt for a therapeutic abortion. But the cruel fact remains that because of the present limits of such detection methods, most birth defects are not discovered until birth. If the child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice that only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so chose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have."

"The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind."

"There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work."

"When anti-DNA doomsday scenarios failed to materialize, even the modestly restrictive governmental regulations began to wither away. In retrospect, recombinant-DNA may rank as the safest revolutionary technology ever developed. To my knowledge, not one fatality, much less illness, has been caused by a genetically manipulated organism. The moral I draw from this painful episode is this: Never postpone experiments that have clearly defined future benefits for fear of dangers that can't be quantified. Though it may sound at first uncaring, we can react rationally only to real (as opposed to hypothetical) risks."

"Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution."

"To have success in science, you need some luck. But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And it's not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward."

"To succeed in science, you have to avoid dumb people (here I was still following Luria's example). Now that might sound inexcusably flip, but the fact is that you must always turn to people who are brighter than yourself."

"To make a huge success, a scientist must be prepared to get into deep trouble. Sometime or another, someone will tell you that you are not ready to do something. … If you are going to make a big jump in science, you will very likely be unqualified to succeed by definition. The truth, however, won't save you from criticism. Your very willingness to take on a very big goal will offend some people who will think that you are too big for your britches and crazy to boot."

"Be sure you have someone up your sleeve who will save you when you find yourself in deep s—."

"Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I'm not good enough to do something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to do something that I like. … Constantly exposing your ideas to informed criticism is very important, and I would venture to say that one reason both of our chief competitors failed to reach the Double Helix before us was that each was effectively very isolated."

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."

"No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

"If we don't play God, who will?"

"I just can’t sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it’s nonsense."

"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

"Never be the brightest person in the room. … We're all imperfect."

"Science Ph.D. students have effectively become serfs. And who would become a serf when you can work for Goldman Sachs and get paid $300,000 a year to become a serf? Why drive a Chevy when you can drive a BMW — and now you're condemned to driving a car from Malaysia or something. Life should be fun."

"New ideas require new facts. You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government that is run by rich trash? Because they've used their money to buy the presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don't want an inheritance tax."

"For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better. I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations. The things that will satisfy me won't satisfy you. On the other hand, if global warming is in any way preventable and it's likely to come, not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society."

"Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous. The whole Larry Summers thing, to say that men are a bit strange and their strangest quality is their ability to understand mathematics -- you're not supposed to even think it."

"I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system."

"If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we'd probably have fewer wars."

"I've seen no evidence of a god, so I'm not going to think about one. Being raised nonreligious made you free. You could look at the evidence. Whether being nonreligious or a Democrat was more important, I can't tell you."

"Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind."

"Science is no stranger to controversy. The pursuit of discovery, of knowledge, is often uncomfortable and disconcerting. I have never been one to shy away from stating what I believe to be the truth, however difficult it might prove to be. This has, at times, got me in hot water. Rarely more so than right now, where I find myself at the centre of a storm of criticism. I can understand much of this reaction. For if I said what I was quoted as saying, then I can only admit that I am bewildered by it. To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief. I have always fiercely defended the position that we should base our view of the world on the state of our knowledge, on fact, and not on what we would like it to be. This is why genetics is so important. For it will lead us to answers to many of the big and difficult questions that have troubled people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But those answers may not be easy, for, as I know all too well, genetics can be cruel. My own son may be one of its victims. Warm and perceptive at the age of 37, Rufus cannot lead an independent life because of schizophrenia, lacking the ability to engage in day-to-day activities."

"Since 1978, when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural genetics by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But irrationality must soon recede. It will soon be possible to read individual genetic messages at costs which will not bankrupt our health systems. In so doing, I hope we see whether changes in DNA sequence, not environmental influences, result in behaviour differences. Finally, we should be able to establish the relative importance of nature as opposed to nurture."

"The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding. In finding out the extent to which genes influence moral behaviour, we shall also be able to understand how genes influence intellectual capacities."

"Right now, at my institute in the US we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks. In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics. All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behaviour. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe that we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence."

"We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves in this great debate, should take care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence."

"No one really wants to admit I exist."

"Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic."

"Crick, however, was right. Our discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answer that question with a definitive No."

"That is why the double helix was so important. It brought the Enlightenment revolution in materialistic thinking into the cell. The intellectual journey that had begun with Copernicus displacing humans from the center of the universe and continued with Darwin’s insistence that humans are merely modified monkeys had finally focused in on the very essence of life. And there was nothing special about it. The double helix is an elegant structure, but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry."

"The discovery of the double helix sounded the death knell for vitalism. Serious scientists, even those religiously inclined, realized that a complete understanding of life would not require the revelation of new laws of nature. Life was just a matter of physics and chemistry, albeit exquisitely organized physics and chemistry. The immediate task ahead would be to figure out how the DNA-encoded script of life went about its work."

"The problem was insoluble: you cannot, we thought, have DNA without proteins, and you cannot have proteins without DNA. RNA, however, being a DNA equivalent (it can store and replicate genetic information) as well as a protein equivalent (it can catalyze critical chemical reactions) offers an answer. In fact, in the “RNA world” the chicken-and-egg problem simply disappears. RNA is both the chicken and the egg. RNA is an evolutionary heirloom. Once natural selection has solved a problem, it tends to stick with that solution, in effect following the maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In other words, in the absence of selective pressure to change, cellular systems do not innovate and so bear many imprints of the evolutionary past. A process may be carried out in a certain way simply because it first evolved that way, not because that is absolutely the best and most efficient way."

"The opposition to GM foods is largely a sociopolitical movement whose arguments, though couched in the language of science, are typically unscientific. Indeed, some of the anti-GM pseudoscience propagated by the media—whether in the interests of sensationalism or out of misguided but well-intentioned concern—would be actually amusing were it not evident that such gibberish is in fact an effective weapon in the propaganda war."

"Sure enough, the notion of decoding their personal DNA appealed to more than a few well-off individuals, even if it amounted to the scientific equivalent of purchasing a vanity license plate."

"Khan analyzed the data and was relieved to find that his son’s DNA was “pretty boring.” In the brave new world of personal genomics, “boring” is the new “great.”"

"Our low gene count by no means invalidates a reductionist approach to biological systems, nor does it justify any logical inference that we are not determined by our genes. A fertilized egg containing a chimp genome still inevitably produces a chimp, while a fertilized egg containing a human genome produces a human. No amount of exposure to classical music or violence on TV could make it otherwise. Yes, we have a long way to go in developing our understanding of just how the information in those two remarkably similar genomes is applied to the task of producing two apparently very different organisms, but the fact remains that the greatest part of what each individual organism will be is programmed ineluctably into its every cell, in the genome."

"This remarkable feat merely reaffirms what most of us in molecular biology have long known to be the truth: the essence of life is complicated chemistry and nothing more."

"The conclusion that we nearly all carry components of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes, although perhaps a blow to our collective ego, does not appear quite so surprising upon reflection. Indeed, the overall lesson of molecular studies of human evolution is just how astonishingly close we are genetically to the rest of the natural world. In fact, molecular data have often challenged (and overthrown) long-held assumptions about human origins."

"Given what a powerful determinant, mostly for ill, skin color has been in human history and individual experience, it is surprising how little we know about its underlying genetics. This deficit, however, may have had less to do with the limitations of our science and more with the intrusion of politics into science; in an academic world terrorized by political correctness, even to study the molecular basis of such a characteristic has been something of a taboo."

"The law has always had difficulty assimilating the implications, if not the very idea, of scientific evidence. Even the most intelligent lawyers, judges, and juries have customarily found it difficult to understand at first."

"My youthful reasoning on the subject, however absurdly misinformed, nevertheless taught me a very valuable lesson: the danger of assuming that genes are responsible for differences we see among individuals or groups. We can err mightily unless we can be confident that environmental factors have not played the more decisive role. This tendency to prefer explanations grounded in “nurture” over ones rooted in “nature” has served a useful social purpose in redressing generations of bigotry. Unfortunately, we have now cultivated too much of a good thing. The current epidemic of political correctness has delivered us to a moment when even the possibility of a genetic basis for difference is a hot potato: there is a fundamentally dishonest resistance to admitting the role our genes almost surely play in setting one individual apart from another."

"And so having signed on to the liberal end of the political spectrum, and finding themselves in a climate intolerant of truths that don’t conform to ideology, most scientists carefully steer clear of research that might uncover such truths. The fact that they duly hew to the prevailing line of liberal orthodoxy—which seeks to honor and entitle difference while shunning any consideration of its biochemical basis—is, I think, bad for science, for a democratic society, and ultimately for human welfare."

"Knowledge, even that which may unsettle us, it surely to be preferred to ignorance, however blissful in the short term the latter may be. All too often, however, political anxiousness favors ignorance and its apparent safety: we had better not learn about the genetics of skin color, goes the unspoken fear, lest such information be marshaled somehow by hatemongers opposed to mixing among the races."

"The tendency is to focus on the worst-case scenario and to shy away from potentially controversial science; it is time, I think, we looked instead at the benefits."

"Ideology—of any kind—and science are at best inappropriate bedfellows. Science may indeed uncover unpleasant truths, but the critical thing is that they are truths. Any effort, whether wicked or well-meaning, to conceal truth or impede its disclosure is destructive. Too often in our free society, scientists willing to take on questions with political ramifications have been made to pay an unjust price."

"Murray and Herrnstein’s assertion, however, was that the discrepancy was so great that environment likely couldn’t explain it all. Similarly, environmental factors alone may not account for why, globally, Asians have on average higher IQs than other racial groups. The idea of measurable variations in average intelligence among ethnic groups is not one, I admit, I want to live with. But though The Bell Curve’s claims remain questionable, we should not allow political anxieties to keep us from looking into them further."

"The finding that there is a substantial genetic component to our behavior should not surprise us; indeed, it would be far more surprising if this were not the case. We are products of evolution: among our ancestors, natural selection indubitably exerted a strong influence over all traits that have figured in our survival."

"The future promises a detailed genetic dissection of personality, and it is hard to imagine that what we discover will not tip the scales of the nature/nurture debate more and more in the direction of nature—a frightening thought for some, but only if we persist in being held hostage by a static, ultimately meaningless dichotomy. To find that any trait, even one with formidable political implications, has a mainly genetic basis is not to find something set immutably in stone. It is merely to understand the nature upon which nurture is ever acting, and those things we, as a society and as individuals, need to do if we are better to assist the process. Let us not allow transient political considerations to set the scientific agenda. Yes, we may uncover truths that make us uneasy in the light of our present circumstances, but it is those circumstances, not nature’s truth, to which policy makers ought to address themselves."

"Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The “secret” to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed—again, chemically—in our DNA."

"If, therefore, we are serious about improving education, we cannot in good conscience ultimately limit ourselves to seeking remedies in nurture. My suspicion, however, is that education policies are too often set by politicians to whom the glib slogan “Leave no child behind” appeals precisely because it is so completely unobjectionable. But children will get left behind if we continue to insist that each one has the same potential for learning."

"The issue, rather, is this: Are we prepared to embrace the undeniably vast potential of genetics to improve the human condition, individually and collectively? Most immediate, would we want the guidance of genetic information to design learning best suited to our children’s individual needs?"

"The reality is that the idea of improving on the genes that nature has given us alarms people. When discussing our genes, we seem ready to commit what philosophers call the naturalistic fallacy, assuming that the way nature intended it is best. By centrally heating our homes and taking antibiotics when we have an infection, we carefully steer clear of the fallacy in our daily lives, but mentions of genetic improvement have us rushing to run the “nature knows best” flag up the mast. For this reason, I think that the acceptance of genetic enhancement will most likely come about through efforts to prevent disease."

"I find such a moralistic response to be profoundly immoral."

"But even if we allow hypothetically that gene enhancement could—like any powerful technology—be applied to nefarious social ends, that only strengthens the case for our developing it. Considering the near impossibility of repressing technological progress, and the fact that much of what is now prohibited is well on its way to becoming practicable, do we dare restrain our own research community and risk allowing some culture that does not share our values to gain the upper hand? From the time the first of our ancestors fashioned a stick into a spear, the outcomes of conflicts throughout history have been dictated by technology."

"And so if there is a paramount ethical issue attending the vast new genetic knowledge created by the Human Genome Project, in my view it is the slow pace at which what we now know is being deployed to diminish human suffering. Leaving aside the uncertainties of gene therapy, I find the lag in embracing even the most unambiguous benefits to be utterly unconscionable. That in our medically advanced society almost no women are screened for the fragile X mutation two decades after its discovery can attest only to ignorance or intransigence."

"I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious people that atheists live in a moral vacuum. Those of us who feel no need for a moral code written down in an ancient tome have, in my opinion, recourse to an innate moral intuition long ago shaped by natural selection promoting social cohesion in groups of our ancestors."

"With its direct contradiction of religious accounts of creation, evolution represents science’s most direct incursion into the religious domain and accordingly provokes the acute defensiveness that characterizes creationism."

"There is in the first place its scientific interest. The discovery of the structure by Crick and Watson, with all its biological implications, has been one of the major scientific events of this century. The number of researches which it has inspired is amazing; it has caused an explosion in biochemistry which has transformed the science. I have been amongst those who have pressed the author to write his recollections while they are still fresh in his mind, knowing how important they would be as a contribution to the history of science. The result has exceeded expectation. The latter chapters, in which the birth of the new idea is described so vividly, are drama of the highest order; the tension mounts and mounts towards the final climax. I do not know of any other instance where one is able to share so intimately in the researcher's struggles and doubts and final triumph. Then again, the story is a poignant example of a dilemma which may confront an investigator. He knows that a colleague has been working for years on a problem and has accumulated a mass of hard-won evidence, which has not yet been published because it is anticipated that success is just around the comer. He has seen this evidence and has good reason to believe that a method of attack which he can envisage, perhaps merely a new point of view, will lead straight to the solution. An offer of collaboration at such a stage might well be regarded as a trespass. Should he go ahead on his own It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial new idea is really one's own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others. The realization of this difficulty has led to the establishment of a some what vague code amongst scientists which recognizes a claim in a line of research staked out by a colleague up to a certain point. When competition comes from more than one quarter, there is no need to hold back. This dilemma comes out clearly in the DNA story. It is a source of deep satisfaction to all intimately concerned that, in the award of the Nobel Prize in 1962, due recognition was given to the long, patient investigation by Wilkins at King's College (London) as well as to the brilliant and rapid final solution by Crick and Watson at Cambridge. Finally, there is the human interest of the story the impression made by Europe and by England in particular upon a young man from the States. He writes with a Pepys like frankness. Those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit. One must remember that his book is not a history, but an autobiographical contribution to the history which will some day be written. As the author himself says, the book is a record of impressions rather than historical facts. The issues were often more complex, and the motives of those who had to deal with them were less tortuous, than he realized at the time. On the other hand, one must admit that his intuitive understanding of human frailty often strikes home."

"He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”."

"Consistently rated as one of the greatest books written about science in the past century, it has been hailed as a work that combines the plot line of a racy novel with deep insights about the nature of modern research. But James Watson, author of The Double Helix, has revealed that his masterpiece came close to being suppressed. In an exclusive interview with the Observer, he admitted last week that his account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, when shown to friends and colleagues in the late 60s, triggered such hostility and outrage it seemed fated never to appear in print. … Many publishers were frightened off by threats of legal action from the manuscript's critics. Watson's depictions of several scientists were deeply unflattering and the book's secondary plot, which focuses on Watson's pursuit of young women – or "popsies" as he called them – around Cambridge, was considered irrelevant and patronising. Harvard University Press, having accepted Watson's manuscript for publication, came under pressure from the university's senior administrators and dropped the book. It took the intervention of Lady Alice Bragg, the wife of Watson's former boss, Sir [William] Lawrence Bragg, to save The Double Helix, Watson has revealed."

"The Double Helix opens with the words: "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." I have never seen James D Watson in a modest mood, either. He is not an innately modest person. In his later years he would consent to press briefings – usually on important anniversaries – and then, with long pauses and enigmatic mumbles, say almost nothing. This was not because he was self-effacing or disliked controversy. He would say almost nothing, one sensed, because he couldn't be bothered with stupid questions from stupid people. He has made it clear more than once that this is his default attitude."

"Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that "ideology has no place in science." On the other hand, some writers are even now maintaining a Lysenkoist position because they believe that the principles of dialectical materialism contradict the claims of genetics. Both of these claims stem from a vulgarisation of Marxist philosophy through deliberate hostility, in the first case, or ignorance, in the second. Nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction. The error of the Lysenkoist claim arises from attempting to apply a dialectical analysis of physical problems from the wrong end. Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated." And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent.""

"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth, with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun. The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution."

"Parts and wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves. These are the properties of things that we call dialectical: that one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration."

"The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science."

"With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. (…) Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen."

"The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make" the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible."

"The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources."

"The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our lives how impossible that is. How, then, can there be a "social science"? The answer, surely, is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists."

"It is characteristic of the design of scientific research that exquisite attention is devoted to methodological problems that can be solved, while the pretense is made that the ones that cannot be solved are really nothing to worry about. On the one hand, biologists will apply the most critical and demanding canons of evidence in the design of measuring instruments or in the procedure for taking an unbiased samples of organisms to be tested, but when asked whether the conditions in the laboratory are likely to be relevant to the situation in nature, they will provide a hand-waving intuitive argument filled with unsubstantiated guesses and prejudices because, in the end, that is all they can do."

"The division between those who try to learn about the world by manipulating it and those who can only observe it had led, in natural science, to a struggle for legitimacy. The experimentalists look down on the observers as merely telling uncheckable just-so stories, while the observers scorn the experimentalists for their cheap victories over excessively simple phenomena. In biology the two camps are now generally segregated in separate academic departments where they can go about their business unhassled by their unbelievers. But the battle is unequal because the observers' consciousness of what it is to do "real" science has been formed in a world dominated by the manipulators of nature. The observers then pretend to an exactness that they cannot achieve and they attempt to objectify a part of nature that is completely accessible only with the air of subjective tools."

"[T]he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the sequence of environmental circumstances that the developing organism experiences during its entire life history. With a few exceptions, like cystic fibrosis where possession of the defective genotype leads ineluctably to the disease, or language acquisition where the language spoken depends only on experience and not at all on genotype, human characteristics are all subject to this interaction of forces. There are, moreover, random events in cell growth and differentiation that are neither genetic nor environmental in the usual sense, and which play an extremely important part in development, especially in behavioral traits."

"An important consequence of the unique interaction between internal and external forces … is that knowledge of genetic differences contains no information at all about whether a characteristic can be changed by environmental and social arrangements. The most elementary error about genetics and development is to suppose that “genetic” is the opposite of “changeable” and that an answer to the question “how much can a trait be changed by social, historical, and individual circumstances” is given by an answer to the question “how important are genes.”"

"Genetics is the study of similarity between relatives, and the problem of human genetics is that, in a species with a family and social structure and a taboo against manipulating individual life histories experimentally, there is a confounding between the similarity of relatives that arises from biological causes and the similarity that arise from social causes."

"To say that genetic differences are relevant to hetero- and homosexuality is not, however, to say that there are “genes for homosexuality” or even that there is a “genetic tendency to homosexuality.” This critical point can be illustrated by an example I owe to the philosopher of science, Elliott Sober. If we look at the chromosomes of people who knit and those who do not, we will find that with few exceptions, knitters have two X chromosomes, while people with one X and one Y chromosome almost never knit. Yet it would be absurd to say that we had discovered genes for knitting. The possession of two X chromosomes causes an embryo, with rare exceptions, to develop into an anatomical and physiological female, while the possession of a Y chromosome leads almost always to male development, and in our culture women are taught to knit while men are not. The beauty of this example is its historical (and geographical) contingency. Had we made the observations before the end of the eighteenth century (or even now in a few Irish, Scottish and Newfoundland communities), the result would have been reversed. Hand knitting was men’s work before the introduction of knitting machines around 1790, and was turned into a female domestic occupation only when mechanization made it economically marginal."

"Lewontin visited an economics class... a few years ago to talk to the students. In a kind of neo-Darwinian jockeying, he said that evolutionary changes are due to the Fisher-Haldane mechanisms: mutation, emigration, immigration, and the like. ...His elaborate cost-benefit mathematical treatment was devoid of chemistry and biology. I asked him why... when he himself was pointing to serious flaws related to the fundamental assumptions, did he teach such nonsense? ...His response was that there were two reasons: the first was "P.E." …I asked. What is "P.E." …he replied, "P.E. is 'physics envy,'"… His second reason was even more insidious: if he didn't couch his studies in neo-Darwinian style... he wouldn't be able to obtain grant money that was set up to support this kind of work."

"The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience ... The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist."

"I have never been entirely satisfied with the materialistic or behavioristic thesis that a complete explanation of brain function is possible in purely objective terms with no reference whatever to subjective experience; i.e., that in scientific analysis we can confidently and advantageously disregard the subjective properties of the brain process. I do not mean we should abandon the objective approach or repeat the errors of the earlier introspective era. It is just that I find it difficult to believe that the sensations and other subjective experiences per se serve no function, have no operational value and no place in our working models of the brain."

"Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety."

"There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience."

"Any model or description that leaves out conscious forces ... is bound to be sadly incomplete and unsatisfactory ... This scheme is one that puts mind back over matter, in a sense, not under or outside or beside it. It is a scheme that idealizes ideas and ideals over physical and chemical interactions, nerve impulse traffic, and DNA. It is a brain model in which conscious mental psychic forces are recognized to be the crowning achievement of some five hundred million years or more of evolution."

"Futurists and common sense concur that a substantial change, worldwide, in life-style and moral guidelines will soon become an absolute necessity."

"It is mutual fear and distrust that mostly generate world tensions and these can be traced in no small measure, like other root causes of worsening world conditions, to different people's conflicting and often intolerant, value-belief differences ... Whereas in the past science did little, if anything, to remedy this situation and in some ways made things worse, our reformed "macro-determinist" science that includes consciousness and subjective values ... provides common universal ethical foundations on which all nations could work to build a World Government or at least a World Security System to help control nuclear developments and other global threats that require international collaboration."

"To see a promising solution to a dilemma and then just leave it to questionable development at its own pace without trying to aid its implementation would seem a dereliction."

"The time has passed when nations should be allowed to do as they individually wish with regard to global matters, each striving solely in its own interests, with the more powerful now able to destroy all humanity and more. For the common good, we need to frame and abide by a higher system of law and justice, designed with less national, more godlike, perspectives for the preservation and welfare of the biosphere as a whole. The problems of setting up and administering an effective, international force of this kind can hardly be more grave, formidable or insoluble than those we encounter on any alternative course."

"The centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension that no one I know of has been able to imagine their nature."

"The cells and fibers of the brain must carry some kind of individual identification tags, presumably cytochemical in nature, by which they are distinguished one from another almost, in many regions, to the level of the single neurons."

"It seems important that the social value factor be more generally recognized as a powerful causal agent in its own right and something to be dealt with directly as such. No more critical task can be projected for the 1970s than that of seeking for civilized society a new, elevated set of value guidelines more suited to man's expanded numbers and new powers over nature, a frame of reference for value priorities that will act to secure and conserve our world instead of destroying it."

"The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade."

"The upward thrust of evolution as part of the design becomes something to preserve and revere."

"The new way of thinking, spawned by the cognitive revolution, shows strong promise ... Reversing previous doctrine in science, the new paradigm affirms that the world we live in is driven not solely by mindless physical forces but, more crucially, by subjective human values. Human values become the underlying key to world change."

"With few exceptions, the bulk of the collected lesion evidence up through the 1950s into the early '60s converged to support the picture of a leading, more highly evolved and intellectual left hemisphere and a relatively retarded right hemisphere that by contrast, in the typical righthander brain, is not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function."

"Earlier contentions that the right hemisphere is not even conscious largely gave way by the mid seventies to an intermediate position conceding that the mute hemisphere may be conscious at some lower elemental levels, but claiming that it lacks the higher, reflective, self-conscious kind of inner awareness that is special to the human mind and is needed, so it is said, to qualify the right conscious system as a "self' or "person". Self awareness in particular is reported, on the basis of mirror tests mainly, to be a predominantly human attribute and is rated by developmental as well as by evolutionary standards to be a highly advanced phase of conscious awareness."

"Unlike other aspects of cognitive function, emotions have never been readily confinable to one hemisphere. Though generated by lateralized input, the emotional effects tend to spread rapidly to involve both hemispheres, apparently through crossed fiber systems in the undivided brain stem."

"One of the more important things to come out of the split-brain work, as an indirect spin-off, is a revised concept of the nature of consciousness and its fundamental relation to brain processing. The key development here is a switch from prior non-causal, parallelist views to a new causal, or "interactionist" interpretation that ascribes to inner experience an integral causal control role in brain function and behavior. In effect, and without resorting to dualist views, the mental forces and properties of the conscious mind are restored to the brain of objective science from which they had long been excluded on materialist-behaviorist principles."

"Cognitive introspective psychology and related cognitive science can no longer be ignored experimentally, or written off as "a science of epiphenomena", nor either as something that must, in principle, reduce eventually to neurophysiology. The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science."

"The former scope of science, its limitations, world perspectives, views of human nature, and its societal role as an intellectual, cultural and moral force all undergo profound change. Where there used to be a chasm and irreconcilable conflict between the scientific and the traditional humanistic views of man and the world, we now perceive a continuum. A unifying new interpretative framework emerges with far reaching impact not only for science but for those ultimate value-belief guidelines by which mankind has tried to live and find meaning."

"As a brain researcher, I'd started out simply accepting the strictly objective principles of the behaviorist position. In the 1950s and early 1960s, all respectable neuroscientists thought in these terms. In those days, we wouldn't have been caught dead implying that consciousness or subjective experience can affect physical brain processing. My first break with this thinking — although I certainly didn't see it that way at the time — came in a 1952 discussion of mind-brain theory in which I proposed a fundamentally new way of looking at consciousness. In it, I suggested that when we focus consciously on an object — and create a mental image for example — it's not because the brain pattern is a copy or neural representation of the perceived object, but because the brain experiences a special kind of interaction with that object, preparing the brain to deal with it. I maintained that an identical feeling or thought on two separate occasions did not necessarily involve the identical nerve cells each time. Instead, it is the operational impact of the neural activity pattern as a whole that counts, and this depends on context — just as the word "lead" can mean different things, depending on the rest of the sentence."

"When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres."

"Science traditionally takes the reductionist approach, saying that the collective properties of molecules, or the fundamental units of whatever system you're talking about, are enough to account for all of the system's activity. But this standard approach leaves out one very important additional factor, and that's the spacing and timing of activity — its pattern or form. The components of any system are linked up in different ways, and these possible relationships, especially at the higher levels, are not completely covered by the physical laws for the elementary interactions between atoms and molecules. At some point, the higher properties of the whole begin to take over and govern the fate of its constituents. A simple way to illustrate this idea is to imagine a molecule in an airplane flying from L.A. to New York. The molecule may be jostled somewhat or held in position by its neighbors, but these lower-level actions are trivial compared to its movement as the plane flies across the continent. If you plot the movement of the molecule through time and space, those features governed by the higher properties of the plane as a whole make those controlled at the level of the molecule insignificant by comparison. The higher properties control the lower, not by direct intervention, but by supervention."

"I have a very one-track mind that needs to concentrate. I asked myself which issue is more important: whether mental states are more left- or right-hemispheric, or whether they are causal in brain function. From weighing the pros and cons, I decided that the left-brain, right-brain work was well in orbit and that it would be more important to shift my primary focus to consciousness. The mind-brain issues are intrinsically more compelling. They carry strong humanistic as well as scientific implications. I could foresee changes in our world view, guiding beliefs, and social values. In the context of today's worsening world conditions and our imperiled future, this work seemed far more important than whether you can find a brain theory enabling people to learn faster, draw better, make better medical diagnoses, and so on. We're beginning to learn the hard way that today's global ills are not cured by more and more science and technology."

"What is needed to break the vicious spiral is a world-wide change in attitudes, values, and social policy. As Einstein put it, "We need a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.""

"Instead of maintaining the traditional separation of science and values, cognitive theory says the two come together in brain function. If we are correct in saying that our conscious mental values not only arise from, but also influence brain processing, then it becomes possible to integrate values with the physical world on a scientific rather than supernatural basis. It's been the traditional role of religion to affirm the primary importance of our higher values in this world by invoking a supreme power. In cognitivism, it is science that affirms the powerful controlling role of higher values, and it is able to do so on grounds that are verifiable — that is, testable against reality as it really is. On these new terms, science no longer upholds a value-empty existence, in which everything, including the human mind, is driven entirely by strictly physical forces of the most elemental kind. We get a vastly revised answer to the old question "What does science leave to believe in?" that gives us a different image of science and the kind of truth science stands for. This new outlook leads to realistic, this world values that provide a strong moral basis for environmentalism and population controls and for policies that would protect the long-term evolving quality of the biosphere."

"Cognitivism bridges the chasm between what the writer C. P. Snow has called the "two cultures" — the widening gap between the world view of the scientist and the humanist. The Caltech philosopher W. T. Jones has called this the crisis of contemporary culture."

"I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain."

"Sperry's thinking about subjective experience, consciousness, the mind, and human values makes a powerful plea for a new scientific examination of ethics in the workings of consciousness. These ideas were crystallized in his paper "The Impact and Promise of the Cognitive Revolution" (1993)."

"The impact of Sperry's philosophy, similar to that of his scientific discoveries previously, has now transcended the boundaries of science and reaches into human awareness worldwide. Dr. Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, for instance, is deeply impressed by, and actively promotes, Sperry's work — He fully recognizes the significance of the neuroscientist's theory of emergence and downward causation, which transcends dualism and reductionism, leads in an unbroken continuum from atoms to subjective experience, and describes each newly emergent phenomenon in the universe as an entity in its own right with laws and properties that never before existed. Such new emergents (which disappear in reductionist thinking) affect everything else on earth, including the elements that created them (downward causation) but most importantly the future quality of evolution. Values, thus — as emergents of brain function — are recognized as the most powerful determinants on earth, even in the world of science."

"People who had damage to the right cerebral hemisphere were unable to recognise simple patterns, or enjoy music, but they could still speak normally. People with left-brain damage were able to recognise patterns, but their speech was impaired. Obviously, then, the left deals with language, and you would expect a split-brain patient to be unable to read with his right eye (connected, remember, to the opposite side of the brain). Sperry's patient was also unable to write anything meaningful (i.e., complicated) with his left hand. They noticed another oddity. if the patient bumped into something with his left side, he did not notice. And the implications were very odd indeed. Not only did the split-brain operation give the patient two separate minds; it also seemed to restrict his identity, or ego, to the left side. When they placed an object in his left hand, and asked him what he was holding, he had no idea. Further experiments underlined the point. If a split-brain patient is shown two different symbols -- say a circle and a square -- with each eye, and is asked to say what he has just seen, he replies, 'A square'. Asked to draw with his left hand what he has seen, and he draws a circle. Asked what he has just drawn, he replies: 'A square'. And when one split-brain patient was shown a picture of a nude male with the right-brain, she blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully: 'I don't know'. The implications are clearly staggering. The person you call 'you' lives in the left side of your brain. And a few centimeters away there is another person, a completely independent identity. Where language is concerned, this other person is almost an imbecile. In other respects, he is more competent than the inhabitant of the left-brain; for example, he can make a far more accurate perspective drawing of a house. In effect, the left-brain person is a scientist, the right-brain an artist."

"People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out-of-the-way, when it struck me." Let me give you another, the way in which group membership can entrain language-usages that are self-deceptive. You can divide people into in-groups or out-groups, or use naturally occurring in-groups and out-groups, and if someone's a member of your in-group and they do something nice, you give a general description of it – "he's a generous person". If they do something negative, you state a particular fact: "in this case he misled me", or something like that. But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member. If an out-group member does something nice, you give a specific description of it: "she gave me directions to where I wanted to go". But if she does something negative, you say, "she's a selfish person". So these kinds of manipulations of reality are occurring largely unconsciously."

"Darwinian social theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry and logic in social relationships which, when more fully comprehended by ourselves, should revitalize our political understanding and provide the intellectual support for a science and medicine of psychology. In the process it should also give us a deeper understanding of the many roots of our suffering."

"This does not mean that scientists can't be religious. We can encompass irrational beliefs without regret and without obligation—I can, actually, look at my kids in a different way than I would an experimental subject under my microscope. I also do not pretend that I view my children rationally and objectively, untainted by emotion or history, and I'm not ashamed of that at all. So, a scientist should have no problem demanding one standard of logic and evidence in the lab, and dropping that demand when they go to church on Sunday."

"If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs — rethinking the world isn't an option."

"...what I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works."

"Look at the bible as a pastiche, a collection of mutually and often internally inconsistent fragments slapped together for crude reasons of politics and art and priestly self-promotion and sometimes beauty and a lot of chest-thumping tribalism, and through that lens, it makes a lot of sense. It does tell us something important…about us, not some fantastic mythological being. It tells us that we are fractious, arrogant, scrappy people who sometimes accomplish great things and more often cause grief and pain to one another. We want to be special in a universe that is uncaring and cold, and in which the nature of our existence is a transient flicker, so we invent these strange stories of grand beginnings, like every orphan dreaming that they are the children of kings who will one day ride up on a white horse and take them away to a beautiful palace and a rich and healthy family that will love them forever. We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned."

"People who say this cracker is literally and physically the body of their god and that I'm doing this great act of heresy and sacrilege and horror -- even though I didn't actually do anything to it -- is disturbing. It's like discovering there are witch doctors lurking in your community and they've been doing weird practices."

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind."

"I have been told that my position won't win the creationist court cases. Do you think I care? I didn't become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars"."

"Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests — put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again."

"If a scientist saw a cataclysm coming, say a meteor on collision course for earth in 2050, we wouldn’t be saying, “Hallelujah, physics is true, bring it on! Our faith in mathematics is strengthened!” We’d be trying to stop it. Which makes the Christian reaction puzzling. If I actually believed Jesus was coming to end the world, I’d be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails. They were pretty effective last time."

"What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail."

"We're confronted all the time with evolving viruses and bacteria. The Red Queen really rules the biological world, and we have to keep running just to keep up pace with the changing microorganisms. Yet policymakers and the public deny vaccination, and evolution itself, and question the value of biomedical research. Maybe they don't believe in evolution, but the microorganisms trying to kill us are taking full advantage of it."

"Faith is a vice pretending to be a virtue, its lies and errors and frothy nonsense deluding us and distracting us from action. There's no salvation in wishful thinking, only inertia. Faith is the enemy of reason. The one thing every single one of us here must be united in despising is faith. It's the barren refuge of the vacuous, the fearful, the frauds, and the obstacles to accomplishment."

"Human beings are still fish."

"If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave."

"I had auditory sensory problems and touch sensitivity problems, I had no problems with my vision. Other people absolutely cannot stand fluorescent lighting and they're sometimes helped by a thing called the Irlen colored glasses where you try on all kinds of different pale colored glasses until it's easier to read. It stops the problem of the print jiggling on the page."

"It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric."

"Even today, romantic love is just not part of my life. And you know what? That's okay with me."

"Mother prepared me to live in the world, but she didn't try to make me into a social being just so I could hang out with other teenagers at the lake, or have pajama parties with other girls. Her eyes were on a bigger prize - giving me the skills and nurturing the talents that would allow me to graduate from school, attend college, find a satisfying job and live independently."

"Since I think just in pictures it's sort of hard to think about abstract concepts so I have to have visual images like for example when I was a child I didn't really understand some of the stuff in the Lord's Prayer and y'know when it talks about "the power and the glory"...and I thought "electrical high tension lines, circular rainbow." "Thou art in Heaven"; that didn't make any sense to me but another autistic person says "Well I always pictured God up in Heaven with an easel.""

"(About the workplace) Tyrants who get into power make life miserable for everyone."

"They may ask why nature or God created such horrible conditions as autism, manic depression, and schizophrenia. However, if the genes that caused these conditions were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay."

"And another reason to make sure we're not doing atrocious things at the slaughter plant is that if it is too easy to do something really atrocious to an animal; with the poor animal screaming and everything; the person who could do that might not have any problem torturing people. I remember one of the reasons that St. Thomas Aquinas said that we have to treat animals right is so that people themselves don't get corrupted."

"I was attending the American Society of Animal Science meetings when the flood occurred. I first learned about it when I read about it on the front page of USA Today, a national newspaper. I grieved for the "dead" books, the same way most people grieve for a dead relative. The destruction of books upset me because "thoughts died." Even though most of the books are still in other libraries, there are many people at the (Colorado State) university who will never read them. To me, Shakespeare lives if we keep performing his plays. He dies, when we stop performing them. I am my work. If the livestock industry continues to use equipment I have designed, then my "thoughts live" and my life has meaning. If my efforts to improve the treatment of cattle and pigs make real improvements in the world, then life is meaningful."

"I don't like radical anything; left or right. I have a radical dislike of radicals."

"You've read about action at a distance, or quantum theory. I've always had the feeling that when I go to a meat plant I must be very careful, because God's watching. Quantum theory will get me."

"I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe - not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe something like order out of disorder. I like to hope that even if there's no personal afterlife, some energy impression is left in the universe... most people can pass on genes - I can pass on thoughts or what I write."

"I won the contract for our company to install new ramps and equipment at Beefland. Building a "Stairway to Heaven" for the animals was more than just constructing a steel ramp-way into a concrete room. All of the workers, myself included, invested ourselves in [t]he project. Sometimes tempers flared, but when the job was completed, we were better friends. As the "stairway" began to take shape, many thoughts crowded in on me. I became aware of how precious life was. I thought about death and I felt close to God. He had given us dominion over the animals so we could make use of them, but I realized now, more than ever, that the animals were His creation too, and, thus, they should be treated with respect. One day my blind roommate visited the plant. She reached over the side of the chute and touched the cattle. She wrote the following prayer after her visit: "The Stairway to Heaven" is dedicated to persons who desire to learn the meaning of life and not to fear death. You, through respect for these animals, can come to respect your fellow man as well. Touch, Listen and Remember.""

"The meaning of life is if something that you did made something better."

"For many, it’s words, not pictures, that shape thought. That’s probably how our culture got to be so talky: Teachers lecture, religious leaders preach, politicians make speeches and we watch “talking heads” on TV. We call most of these people neurotypical — they develop along predictable lines and communicate, for the most part, verbally."

"The popularization of the term neurodivergence and society’s growing understanding about the different ways that brains work are unquestionably positive developments for many individuals like me."

"many aspects of our society are not set up to allow visual thinkers — which so many of us neurodivergent folks are — to thrive. In fact, many aspects of our society seem set up specifically so we will fail. Schools force students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. The workplace relies too much on résumés and G.P.A.s to assess candidates’ worth. This must change not only because neurodivergent people, and all visual thinkers, deserve better but also because without a major shift in how we think about how we learn, American innovation will be stifled."

"We hear a great deal about the need to fix the infrastructure in this country, but we are too focused on the things that need improving and updating rather than the people who will be able to do the work."

"I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding."

"The true measure of an education isn't what grades a student gets today, but where they are 10 years later."

"Complementary skills are the key to successful teams."

"the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems."

"One thing that worries me is seeing, for example, the guys at the Jet Propulsion Lab who are my age. They are eccentric geeks. What would happen to the younger version of these people today? Would they have a fun job where they're the navigator for the Mars rover or would they be playing video games in a basement somewhere?"

"I hate violent images in the movies. Since I think in pictures, it is difficult to get these images out of my memory. I do not want this bad stuff in my memory. Reading about violence does not upset me, it is seeing it. Cartoon violence and car crashes have no effect. The images I want to avoid are realistic depictions of torture and cruelty."

"(What do you like to read or watch for entertainment?) I like Arthur C. Clark and David Brinn. I loved the movies Avatar and Gravity. My favorite science fiction TV show was the original Star Trek. My favorite science fiction movies are 2001: A Space Odyssey and Avatar. For reading materials on the plane, I read The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Business Week, and many others. At home I read Science, Nature, Beef Magazine, National Hog Farmer, Feedstuff, New Scientist, and The New Yorker."

"I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors. (p3)"

"All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. (p5)"

"Breeders need to realize that they can't have everything. There's a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three. You have to pick two. It's true with genetics too. (p200)"

"Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise. (p217)"

"Animals like novelty if they can choose to investigate it; they fear novelty if you shove it in their faces. (p287)"

"At first I thought engineering could make all the improvements happen, but later in my career I learned that good engineering and design must be coupled with good management. (p296)"

"The best thing a parent of a newly diagnosed child can do is to watch their child without preconceived notions and judgements and learn how the child functions, acts, and reacts to his or her world. (p2)"

"Autistic thinking is always detailed and specific. Teachers and parents need to help both children and adults with autism take all the little details they have in their head and put them into categories to form concepts and promote generalization. (p33)"

"There is often too much emphasis in the world of autism on the deficits of these children and not enough emphasis on developing the special talents that many of them possess. (p35)"

"For me and other people on the autism spectrum, sensory experiences that have little or no effect on neurotypical people can be severe life stressors for us. Loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. (p57)"

"All people want to feel their efforts matter, and individuals with ASD are no different. (p214)"

"my mind works like Google for images. You put in a key word; it brings up pictures. See language for me narrates the pictures in my mind."

"the things that scare a prey/species animal like cattle are a whole lot of little visual details that people just don't tend to notice. And one of the big problems they used to have is the people just wanted to get out there and yell and scream and push and shove and you know more and more prods. Rather than remove the things that the cattle were afraid of."

"I feel very strongly that if you got rid of all of the autistic genetics you're not going to have any scientists. There'd be no computer people. You'd lose a lot of artists and musicians. There'd be a horrible price to pay. It's like a little bit of the autistic trait can give some advantages. You get too much of the autistic trait then you get a very severe handicap where the person's going to remain non-verbal. It's a continuum from a severe handicap all the way up to something where it's a personality variant."

"if you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world."

"I played around with vegetarianism back in the ‘70s. One thing, my physiology just got to have animal protein. I get hypoglycemic, I get all light-headed unless I eat animal protein. And I did a lot of thinking about this and I've designed a lot of equipment for meat plants. The cattle would have never been born, you know, if we hadn't raised them. And I feel very strongly, we've got to give animals a good life. I've worked really hard improving slaughter plants and animal handling and transport. And people have said to me, "Why don't you work on improving conditions on pig farms?" And basically, to be effective on making real change out there on the ground, you can only work on so many things. You know, you get too distributed, you're not effective. And, you know, I've got my one area I work in and I want to educate people about autism and I also want to improve, you know, animal handling and transport and make a real change out in the field on the ground."

"I was lucky in the ‘60s to also be taking a class in Classical Ethology by a professor named Tom Evans, where I learned that operant conditioning does not explain all animal behavior. He explained how fixed action patterns and hardwired instinctual behavior works. And I remember going on a visit to Dr. Skinner and I felt like I was visiting, you know, the grand temple of psychology. And I went up to his office and, you know, he seemed, I'm like, "oh, you mean he's actually an ordinary person?" And we got to talking and of course back then I wore a dress you know ‘cause, you know, ladies had to be, like, dressed up, and I had a very conservative dress on, and B.F. Skinner touched my legs. And I said "You may look at them, but you may not touch them" and that ended that. And that is as he was showing me around the rat lab, I said "Dr. Skinner if we can just learn about the brain then we really would know some things". And Dr. Skinner says to me "We don't need to know anything about the brain, we have operant conditioning". And I just never really could accept that. You know, especially after taking Tom Evans' class at the same time."

"I've been doing autism talks for the last 20 years and there still are people out there that do not want to, they can't recognize that these sensory problems are real. That, for some of these kids when that fire alarm goes off, that really hurts the ears, it's a really real thing."

"Problems that autistic people have with eye contact and awkward gestures are not visible on the Internet, and typewritten messages avoid many of the social problems of face-to-face contact. The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person's social life. (p100)"

"The possibility that a void exists after death has motivated me to work hard so I can make a difference — so that my thoughts and ideas will not die. When I was working on my Ph.D., a coworker in our lab told me that the world's libraries contain our extra soma, or out-of-body genes. Ideas are passed on like genes, and I have a great urge to spread my ideas. I read an article in the newspaper about an official at the New York Public Library who said that the only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity. I put this on a sign and placed it over my desk. It helped me to persevere and get through my Ph.D. work. (p199)"

"Most people don't realize that the slaughter plant is much gentler than nature. Animals in the wild die from starvation, predators, or exposure. If I had a choice, I would rather go through a slaughter system than have my guts ripped out by coyotes or lions while I was still conscious. Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die."

"I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution. (p206)"

"Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs."

"The peak of the [Presidential] campaign happened in Albuquerque, where a local reporter said to me, "Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate or are you just running on the issues?""

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"We do have something of a story here, a true story, that we can work with religiously should we elect to do so. … There are clearly all sorts of flavors right now, just as there were when … Christianity was being put together, which took centuries to get the core in place and has been under revision ever since. Let's keep talking!"

"It seems far simpler to go ahead and say that the epic is a fantastic myth, that happens to be true of the material Universe, that other myths are true in terms of their cultural meaning, and that there's absolutely no problem with holding more than one story, just as there's no problem with viewing the sunset in terms of planetary rotation and spectra and nuclear fusions one moment and as visual splendor the next."

"I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation. And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation."

"The concept of an independent "spiritual realm" does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human."

"Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago."

"I think that with all the emphasis on achievement, careers and competitiveness, science education has become — with notable bright spots to be sure — a joyless, alienating and frustrating experience for millions and millions of kids. There are those science-fair-winner types and then there's the rest of the class, not grooving on the material and hence, they find out, doomed to mediocre futures. Seems like ambivalence and hostility aren't such surprising responses to such a message. … I think things might go better if the narrative of our scientific understandings of nature — what some are calling "Big History" — were told early and often, capturing the interest and imagination of students from a young age. They might then be eager to learn the problem-solving, evidence-based process of scientific inquiry that has led to these understandings."

"While I agree… that indifference is indeed our most dangerous capacity, I actually do believe that it's on the wane. When I scroll back to my 1950's Connecticut girlhood and recall how clueless everyone was about just about everything, how we mindlessly parroted concepts like "Better Dead Than Red" and the "Domino Theory," how my friends were all lily-white and Koreans were gooks and I would have had no idea where to find Nigeria on a map – when I go back there and then think about Adam's students and my students and my kids and what they've come to understand and care about, it gets a whole lot better."

"Scientific inquiry has provisioned us with a mind-boggling new core narrative — the epic of evolution, the epic of creation, the universe story, big history, everybody's story — where humans and human cultures are understood to be emergent from and, hence, a part of nature. Naturalists adopt this account as their core narrative, with full recognition that these understandings will certainly deepen and may shift with further scientific inquiry. They adopt the story currently on offer and do not simply select features of the story that support preferred theories of nature. … A religious naturalist is a naturalist who has adopted the epic as a core narrative and goes on to explore its religious potential, developing interpretive, spiritual and moral/ethical responses to the story. Importantly, these responses are not front-loaded into the story as they are in the traditions. Therefore, the religious naturalist engages in a process, both individually and in the company of fellow explorers, to discover and experience them. These explorations are informed and guided by the mindful understandings inherent in our human traditions, including art, literature, philosophy and the religions of the world."

"The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix. I stand in awe of these religions. I am deeply enmeshed in one of them myself. I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies."

"The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures — this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true."

"Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview — a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are; our scientific account of Nature, an account that can be called the Epic of Evolution… This is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true. If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reality — and I believe that they can — then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate. I will not presume to suggest what this ethos might look like. Its articulation must be a global project. But I am convinced that the project can be undertaken only if we all experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all, share a reverence for how life works, and acknowledge a deep and complex imperative that life continue."

"The evolution of the cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understanding of the evolution of death offers me helpful ways to think about my own death."

"Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor."

"For me, Deism doesn't work because I find I can only think of a creator in human terms, and the concept of a human-like creator of muons and neutrinos has no meaning for me. But more profoundly, Deism spoils my covenant with Mystery. To assign attributes to Mystery is to disenchant it, to take away its luminance. I think of the ancients ascribing thunder and lightning to godly feuds, and I smile. The need for explanation pulsates in us all."

"Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances."

"The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us."

"The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes required for life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism. The intermediate level, the chords and tempos, has to do with how the biochemistry and biophysics are organized, arranged, played out in space and time to produce a creature who grows and divides and is."

"Patterns of gene expression are to organisms as melodies and harmonies are to sonatas. It's all about which sets of proteins appear in a cell at the same time (the chords) and which sets come before or after other sets (the themes) and at what rate they appear (the tempos) and how they modulate one another (the developments and transitions). When these patterns go awry we may see malignancy. When they change by mutation we can get new kinds of organisms. When they work, we get a creature."

"I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence … And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace."

"We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone."

"Once there is empathy, then there can be the feeling we call compassion. A version of the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is found in most religious traditions. … and emergent from our sense of compassion, in mortal conflict with our insistent sense that we should win, is our haunting sense that things should be fair."

"We nurture our children selflessly. But we also recognize them as our most tangible sources of renewal — for a child, the world is always new. Renewal has been a religious theme throughout the ages … All of us see in children — our own and all children — the hope and promise of what we humans can become. As the forbears of our children we are called to transmit to them a joyous and sustainable vision of their future — meaning that we are each called to develop such a vision."

"For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God or Allah or Jehovah or Mary and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus' love, I am drawn to their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end, such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are."

"Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees, and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love."

"We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Where did the laws of physics come from? Why does the universe seem so strange? My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted. They may be gleaned from existing faith traditions or from personal search. God may be apprehended as a remote Author without present-day agency, or as an interested Presence with whom one can form a relationship, or as pantheistic — Inherent in All Things. The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no Beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the universe on — to ask Why Are Things As They Are? — is to generate the foundation for everything else."

"When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos."

"We arrived but a moment ago, and found [Earth] to be perfect for us in every way. And then we came to understand that it is perfect because we arose from it and are a part of it. Hosannah! Not in the highest, but right here, right now, this. When such gratitude flows from our beings, it matters little whether we"

"The tapestry maker first strings the warp, long strong fibers anchored firmly to the loom, and then interweaves the weft, the patterns, the color, the art. The epic of evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment. And then, after that, we are all free to be artists, to render in language and painting and song and dance our ultimate hopes and concerns and understandings of human nature. Throughout the ages, the weaving of our religious weft has been the province of our prophets and gurus and liturgists and poets. The texts and art and ritual that come to us from these revered ancestors include claims about Nature and Agency that are no longer plausible. They use a different warp. But for me at least, this is just one of those historical facts, something that can be absorbed, appreciated, and then put aside as I encounter the deep wisdom embedded in these traditions and the abundant opportunities that they offer to experience transcendence and clarity."

"I love traditional religions. Whenever I wander into distinctive churches or mosques or temples, or visit museums of religious art, or hear performances of sacred music, I am enthralled by the beauty and solemnity and power they offer. Once we have our feelings about Nature in place, then I believe that we can also find important ways to call ourselves Jews, or Muslims, or Taoists, or Hopi, or Hindus, or Christians, or Buddhists. Or some of each. The words in the traditional texts may sound different to us than they did to their authors, but they continue to resonate with our religious selves. We know what they are intended to mean."

"Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story — what we are calling religious naturalism — can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions. This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times."

"All life has a kind of seamlessness. All creatures have to be aware of their environment, and there has been an evolution of the capacities needed for detecting increasingly complex stimuli. I have no problem calling this "meaning," since all creatures pick out meaningful facets of their environment. For the first creatures, these facets were physical and mediated by receptor proteins. Sperm and eggs find each other by protein shapes; photosynthetic bacteria find light by protein shapes. The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains."

"A great many people say we have language and imagination to posit creators, interveners, and agencies that we can't actually prove. And yet some people experience God within them--these experiences are not drawn-up hypotheses. It's possible those of us who don't feel God within them have deficient brains that aren't capable of such experiences; or alternatively, the people who experience these things have brains that somehow create them. As near as I can tell, the jury is out on that. I may be a non-theist who doesn't include a god concept in my religious orientation because I have an incompetent brain, or perhaps theists have brains giving them inaccurate information."

"I don't have any problem accessing experiences of unity. I feel completely part of the universe and all that's going on. When I try to describe it, people say I'm obviously a mystic. It doesn't seem mystical to me in a theistic sense. It's not a state that engenders in me any sense that God is watching over me and paying attention to what I'm doing. It's much more what I understand the Eastern traditions to be talking about — a belonging to the universe, an overflow of astonishment and wonder and peace and tranquility."

"The big bang is obviously one form of beginning, but the big bang in itself is unimaginable. It's one thing to think about God making a flower or infusing the planet with love, but to imagine what might be behind the big bang is so removed from real life that it actually loses importance for me. There's so much else to think about that's here and now. I like the Buddhist concept of beginning-less-ness, that the universe has always been going on."

"The Buddhist view is more congruent with evolution than are other views. You can actually have beginning-less-ness and still have creation of a particular universe … The part that doesn't jibe for me is the whole notion that consciousness is this separate thing that goes in and out of sentient beings."

"The good stuff of most religions turns out to be a golden rule that defines a morality which allows humans to flourish in community. We come from a whole lineage of creatures who are robustly social and have communities that work, so you look at how their flourishing communities are set up. Are there parallels between how life works in a structured, non-human primate group, in a human community, and in the moral guidelines religion offers? It's not all that different as far as I can tell-there is hierarchy, strategic reciprocity, nurture and empathy."

"Perhaps we should all settle down and think about what's good in the world and what we want to do here. If we find this planet and its history and its story to be sacred, let's preserve and nourish it, and then we can go home at night and say whatever prayers we choose."

"There are two flavors of God people: those whose God is natural and those whose God is supernatural. Certainly there are a lot of people within religious naturalism who have no problem with God language — God as love, God as evolution, God as process. People see God as part of nature and give God-attributes to the part of nature that they find most sacred. I encounter people like that all the time."

"The people who are truly bothered by God-concepts and find them stupid or ignorant or pathological are those like Richard Dawkins who just can't even imagine anybody having such concepts. That view is almost like homophobia — it's not open and pluralistic. I'm much more interested in helping people engage in this story of evolution. If they do that with theistic language, that's great."

"We all eat or are eaten. That's the way life works, it's a greater rhythm. And that's why science and the understandings it has uncovered can be a source of joy. This all relates to assent, a very important Judeo-Christian concept. "Thy will be done" is a God-kind of assent. "God works in mysterious ways," and you're supposed to give assent even if you don't like it. As a religious naturalist, I think of assent differently. Assent is saying, "Okay, for whatever reason, this is the way life works. It's an acceptance of what is. After that fundamental acceptance, I can live my life to minimize suffering and promote as much as good as I can, and try through whatever work I do to help others." We can't get around death, but we can get around poverty. We can try to avoid women being brutalized. We can curb environmental degradation. One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished."

"The most reliable joy is to be out of doors, to be a creature among other creatures. I find it very restful."

"Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and assent."

"The word "religion" goes back to the Latin ligere, "to bind." So religion means "to bind together again." I think we should develop religions that allow us to do that."

"Law is necessary, but in a more functional culture, it would presumably be less necessary than it is now, because people would know what to do."

"There are two kinds of power. "Power over" is very problematical. "Power within" is very exciting. You can tell the difference by whether you are messing with other people or not."

"What scares me? The way the world is going. People seem to think that development is more important than sustainability. That fundamentalism is more important than openness. That racial differences should dictate political decisions. That a person's sexuality is somebody else's business."

"I like mindful people. Fear prevents mindfulness, and then greed marches in because you are fearful, so you feel like you have to shore everything up."

"You can't have thought without emotion, and one emotion is fear, and making an important decision on the basis of fear is not a good idea. So develop your courage."

"Naturalism has been defined by many people. It's just a world view that does not include the supernatural so it's everything else."

"Well, God answers of course come in every flavor imaginable these days so God can be process-God can be mind-God … so there are all of these ways that God is now configured as well as the ones that come to us from traditional religions where God has much more power — then there's the whole personal God part which I do talk about in there at some point. So I don't think that even that there is a God framework out there at this point that I am either accepting or rejecting. My response is that I call myself a non-theist as opposed to an atheist because as I see an atheist as having a belief about God, i.e. that there isn't one. And my I've never been actually very interested in the question I guess is one way to put it. I see it as a question That can be summarized in the aphorism "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing." And science doesn't have any answer to That so what I articulated in the book and continued to do is what I call a covenant with mystery where mystery is itself a … noun but I am using it as literally in absence of category. It's not like I have a mystery then I put attributions onto it it just … I don't know the answers."

"There are all sorts of transcendent response on offer but they to my mind are not necessary to call oneself religious. And obviously this is … semantics as much as anything else. But I do go ahead and consider myself a religious person."

"Ionizing radiation has always been with us and will be for all foreseeable time. Our genetic system is probably well adjusted by natural selection to normal background radiation. Added radiation will increase the frequency of mutations; most of these will be harmful. Exposure to radiation in large amounts will increase malignant disease; small amounts may possibly do the same. In view of these potentially harmful effects every reasonable effort should be made to reduce the levels of ionizing radiation to which man is exposed to to the lowest levels that can reasonably be attained."

"Physics is a wrong tool to describe living systems."

"I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it."

"Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday."

"This is a classic case of what is often called physics envy, the disease among scientists where the behavioral biologists fear their discipline lacks the rigor of physiology, the physiologists wish for the techniques of the biochemists, the biochemists covet the clarity of the answers revealed by molecular biologists, all the way down the down until you get to the physicists, who confer only with God."

"We are a fine species with some potential. Yet we are racked by sickening amounts of violence. Unless we are hermints, we feel the threat of it, often as a daily shadow. And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence."

"The ones who I train to become scientists go at it like the warriors they should be, overturning existing knowledge and reigning paradigms, each discovery a murder of their scientific ancestors. And if I have trained them well, I must derive whatever satisfaction I can from the inevitability of becoming their Oedipal target someday."

"The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well."

"The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious."

"Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease."

"Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out — that sort of thing."

"If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble."

"What's the punch line here? Physiologically, it doesn't come cheap being a bastard 24 hours a day."

"We are not getting our ulcers being chased by Saber-tooth tigers, we're inventing our social stressors — and if some baboons are good at dealing with this, we should be able to as well. Insofar as we're smart enough to have invented this stuff and stupid enough to fall for it, we have the potential to be wise enough to keep the stuff in perspective."

"Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have. ... Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait. You can show this formally: schizophrenics have a lower rate of leaving copies of their genes in the next generation than unaffected siblings. By the rules, by the economics of evolution, this is a maladaptive trait. Yet, it chugs along at a one to two percent rate in every culture on this planet. So what's the adaptive advantage of schizophrenia? It has to do with a classic truism — this business that sometimes you have a genetic trait which in the full-blown version is a disaster, but the partial version is good news."

"Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words." You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops." This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness."

"In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly. It's the shamans who are moving separate from everyone else, living alone, who talk with the dead, who speak in tongues, who go out with the full moon and turn into a hyena overnight, and that sort of stuff. It's the shamans who have all this metamagical thinking. When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans. What's very clear, though, is they all have a limit on the number of shamans. That is this classic sort of balanced selection of evolution. There is a need for this subtype — but not too many. The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. This is not somebody babbling in tongues all the time in the middle of the hunt. This is someone babbling during the right ceremony. This is not somebody hearing voices all the time, this is somebody hearing voices only at the right point. It's a milder, more controlled version. Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. Shamans are not leaving fewer copies of their genes. These are some of the most powerful, honored members of society. This is where the selection is coming from. … In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic."

"Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom. It's that same exact principle: it's great having one of these guys, but we sure wouldn't want to have three of them in our tribe. Overdo it, and our schizotypalism in the Western religious setting is what we call a "cult," and there you are in the realm of a Charles Manson or a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. You can only do post-hoc forensic psychiatry on Koresh and Jones, but Charles Manson is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. But get it just right, and people are gonna get the day off from work on your birthday for millennia to come. [laughter] This is great! I think this is the first time I've ever said that line without somebody getting up and leaving in a huff from the audience. It's very nice being here."

"Orthodox Judaism has this amazing set of rules: everyday there's a bunch of strictures of things you're supposed to do, a bunch you're not supposed to do, and the number you're supposed to do is the same number as the number of bones in the body. The number that you're not supposed to do is the same number as the number of days in the year. The amazing thing is, nobody knows what the rules are! Talmudic rabbis have been scratching each others' eyes out for centuries arguing over which rules go into the 613. The numbers are more important than the content. It is sheer numerology."

"I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist. Even if we learn about how everything works, that doesn't mean anything at all. You can reduce how an impala leaps to a bunch of biomechanical equations. You can turn Bach into contrapuntal equations, and that doesn't reduce in the slightest our capacity to be moved by a gazelle leaping or Bach thundering. There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed. The more important reason why people shouldn't be afraid is, we're never going to inadvertently go and explain everything. We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything. When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with."

"The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery. The purpose of science is to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate that mystery. To always use it in a context where we are helping people in trying to resist the forces of ideology that we are all familiar with."

"We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it’s the "right" type of aggression, we love it."

"Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia."

"Ecosystems majorly shape culture — but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists."

"Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd."

"We're only a couple of hundreds of years into understanding that epilepsy is a neurological disease and not a demonic possession. We're only about 50 years into understanding that certain types of learning disabilities are micro malformations in the cortex in people with dyslexia and not laziness or lack of motivation. The vast majority of these factoids [presented in the book] are 10, 20 years old, and all that's gonna happen is we're gonna learn more and more of that stuff. And what we're going to learn more and more is to recognise extents to which we're biological organisms and our behaviours have to be evaluated in that realm. For my money, what that eventually does is make words like "soul" or "evil" utterly absurd and medieval, but it also makes words like "punishment" or "justice" very questionable, as well. I think it will require an enormous reshaping of how we think we deal with the most damaging of human behaviours, because none of it can be thought of outside the context of biology."

"From the very moment of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are."

"In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice."

"Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe."

"The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God’s or Jesus’s commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources."

"It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can’t reconcile for yourself."

"No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from the Bible or God. Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture."

"Religion may be a quest for the truth, but it has no way of finding the truth, or verifying what it claims to find. Our knowledge of what God is like has not advanced one iota over the ideas of the 1500s. And insofar as theological interpretation has changed, it’s done so not as a result of faith’s quest for truth, but of pressure from science and secular morality. Really, can any theologian, philosopher, or scientist tell me anything about God now that we didn’t know 500 years ago? Then ask a scientist what we know now about science that we didn’t know in 1500."

"Come on, readers, give me one example of a question that religion has answered to everyone’s satisfaction—one example of a “truth” found in religion’s quest for truth."

"But this (a listing of illustrations of how the genome can change other than by mutations) doesn’t constitute a crisis—it’s a very interesting finding that shows that variation in a genome can arise by processes other than mutation of an organism’s own DNA. The disposition of that variation still must occur via either natural selection (it can be good or bad) or genetic drift (no effect on fitness). This hasn’t really changed the theory of evolution one iota, though it’s changed our view of where organisms can acquire new genes."

"Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn’t come close."

"I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found."

"Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord “respect” to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?"

"Theodicy is the Achilles Heel of faith. There is no reasonable answer to the problem of gratuitous evil (i.e., the slaughter of children or mass killings by natural phenomena like tsunamis), and the will to continue believing in the face of such things truly shows the folly of faith. For those evils prove absolutely either that God is not benevolent and omnipotent, or that there is no god. (Special pleading like “we don’t know God’s mind” doesn’t wash, for the same people who say such things also claim to know that God is benevolent and omnipotent). Both nonbelief or belief in a malicious or uncaring God are unacceptable to the goddy. Ergo, any rational person who contemplates gratuitous evil must become an agnostic, an atheist, or someone who rejects the Abrahamic God. It is a touchstone of rationality."

"Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it."

"In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding “truth”: dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not."

"No, we don’t have faith in reason and science in the same way as “Cru” members have faith in God. I see “faith” according to Walter Kaufmann’s definition: strong belief in propositions for which there is insufficient evidence to command the assent of every reasonable person. We have confidence in science because it has led us to provisional truths—it works. Cru doesn’t even know if there’s any God, or, if there is a divine presence, that it’s the Abrahamic god rather than the Hindu god, Yahweh, or Wotan. And we use reason in the same way: it leads us to truth. Revelation, dogma, and authority do not, for if they did there would be only one religion rather than thousands with their disparate and often conflicting doctrines."

"Can a geology teacher blithely tell his students that the earth is flat, or a European history professor that the Holocaust didn’t happen? That’s not academic freedom, but dereliction of duty."

"Some believers are fundamentalists about everything, but every believer is a fundamentalist about something."

"Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren’t true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith’s claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The “constructive dialogue” between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monlogue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process."

"“HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?” That’s the question you should always ask believers when they make unsupported assertions, ranging from “God is loving” to “Our souls live on after death.” The answer will always be one of two things: “The Bible says so,” or “I just know it to be true.” Neither of those are rational answers, but they satisfy the religious. It is in fact the “how-do-you-know-that” query that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old. While atheists have always decried the lack of evidence for theism, it is the infusion of scientists and science-friendly people into atheism, starting with Carl Sagan and continuing on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Pinker, and Dennett, that has made us realize that religious dogmas are in fact hypotheses, and you need reasons and evidence for accepting them. If you have none, then you have no reason to believe in God. Nevertheless, religious dogma does change, but not because theology has found better reasons. It’s because a.) science has shown the dogma to be false (Genesis, Adam and Eve, creation, the Exodus, etc.) or b.) secular morality has shown that the tenets of religious belief are no longer supportable (hell as a place of fire, limbo, discrimination against gays, the Mormons’ refusal to let blacks be priests, etc.)"

"He is a dissimulator, a back-pedaler, a coward, and a self-serving ignoramus. In other words, he’s a politician."

"Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem nihilistic and dark. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real. Right now my purpose is to write this piece, and then I’ll work on a book, and later I’ll have dinner with a friend. Soon I’ll go to Poland to visit more friends. Maybe later I’ll read a nice book and learn something. Those are real purposes, not illusory purposes to which Douthat wants us to devote our only life."

"An “intellectual tradition,” as anyone with two neurons to rub together knows, is not the same thing as evidence. But theologians seem to lack that second neuron."

"Since neither Robbins, nor Hart, nor any other Sophisticated Theologian™ or Hipster Poet has produced any evidence for God that would convince someone who wasn’t already a believer or an incipient believer, we needn’t take their claims seriously. The reason people like Robbins sneer at the New Atheists’ call for evidence is because believers don’t have any."

"Anybody who claims that people don’t cherry-pick their morality from the Bible, choosing that which comports with their extra-Biblical notions of what’s good and bad, is simply blind."

"The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward."

"Religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims. Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence."

"Even more than religious belief, acceptance or denial of evolution is a test of character. For if you deny evolution is true, you are either pandering to the public even though you know better (showing that you’re ambitious but lack character), are truly ignorant of the facts (which means you can’t be trusted to be informed about crucial issues), or are a flat-out creationist (showing that you’re batshit crazy)."

"Atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there’s no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science."

"One child dead because of superstition is one too many."

"Postmodernism poisons everything."

"I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin."

"After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence."

"He is the embodiment of greed, ambition, bigotry, and dislike of the marginalized. Of course, all that means is that he simply instantiates in a clear way the values of the GOP, but they don’t like those being so out in the open! Trump is in fact the very product of what Republicans stand for: he’s a monster they created, but now they don’t like it. They want those values, but expressed sotto voce, and by a slicker candidate."

"Theology schools are the wisdom teeth of academia: useless and sometimes injurious remnants of earlier times. If you want to teach comparative religion in college, you can do it in sociology departments, and if you want to teach the history of religion or of how scripture was confected, you can do it in history departments. There is no rationale for a modern secular university to teach theology, for it is the study of a nonexistent being and its supposed wants."

"I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time."

"On the Right we have a bunch of regressive conservatives who demonize minorities and women and have no sympathy for the downtrodden, while on the Left we have regressive Leftists who try to censor people’s speech, take the side of extremist Islamists against women and gays, and shut down disagreement by other Leftists who aren’t pure enough. What is a person to do? The answer, of course, is to call out both sides for regressive behavior."

"Faith is not a virtue, but a character flaw."

"To Parker Bright, Hannah Black, and other critics of this painting, I say this: I completely reject your criticism. If only artists of the proper ethnicity can depict violence inflicted on their group, then only writers of the proper ethnicity can write about the same issues, and so on with all the arts. And what goes for ethnicity or race goes for gender: men cannot write about suffering inflicted on women, nor women about suffering inflicted on men. Gays cannot write about straight people and vice versa. The fact is that we are all human, and we are all capable of sharing, as well as depicting, the pain and suffering of others. I will not allow you to fracture art and literature the way you have fractured politics. Yes, horrible injustices have been visited on minority groups, on women, on gays, and on other marginalized people, but to allow that injustice to be conveyed only by “properly ethnic or gendered artists” is to deny us our common humanity and deprive us of emotional solidarity. No group, whatever its pigmentation or chromosomal constitution, has the exclusive right to create art or literature about their own subgroup. To deny others that right is to censor them. To those who say this painting has caused them “unnecessary hurt” because it is by a white artist about black pain, I say, “Your own pain about this artwork is gratuitous; I do not take it seriously. It’s the cry of a coddled child who simply wants attention.”"

"The editorial, very poorly written for a college full of smart students, shows how far this “hate speech” cancer has spread. Let me provide for you Coyne’s Glossary for the words at issue:"

"We needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer."

"Danger! Mushbrains and believers at work!"

"The realization that God is not the source of morality is, I think, one of the great contributions of philosophy to clarifying human thought."

"Remember three things about censorship. First, it doesn’t work to suppress art or words that you don’t like. Second, trying to censor something just arouses interest in it, as well as resentment towards those who try to tell others what they can or cannot see. Third, exhibiting art or recommending that students read a book does not mean an endorsement of the image or contents."

"Guilt is the great weapon of the Authoritarian Left, and we must resist it when it comes to endorsing free expression."

"The truth is the truth, regardless of whether it fits your ideological biases."

"If religion makes a society happier, there’s no data to show that. All we see is that on average countries that are well off are less religious and are happier; and that goes for U.S. states as well. Checkmate, religionists."

"If Hawking’s world is “small,” well, at least what he found was testable, and might be true. Father de Souza’s claims are either untestable or have already been shown to be doubtful, and he has no evidence for any of them. In requiring people to believe fairy tales, de Souza’s world is not just small, but nonexistent."

"This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, “lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they’re free to say whatever they want, or “discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient."

"What the comedy club in Montreal is doing is not only ridiculous, but is a prime example of virtue signaling: making a gesture to trumpet your own ideological purity, but a gesture that has no effect on society and no mitigation of injustice."

"In other words, (Helen) Pluckrose et al. got a lot more attention than I did. And that’s fine. For they did, to my mind, expose a creeping rot in the floorboards of academic humanities, which has becoming increasingly solipsistic, tendentious, propagandistic, and devoid of critical thinking but besotted with intersectionalist ideology."

"There is no compromise possible between catering to woke students and maintaining journalistic standards. We all know that this is true. If you feed the beast, it only gets hungrier, and is never full."

"“Safety” and “harm” have become the new buzzwords to use when somebody does something you don’t like."

"Everyone else besides the faithful already knows that religion has nothing useful to say to science."

"As we know, wokeness prizes ideology and narrative over truth."

"Yes, the claim that sex in humans is not a binary is pretty much a lie, and is made on ideological rather than scientific grounds."

"This will not abate: wokeness is a one-way ratchet to pure authoritarianism."

"The Woke are after Pinker again, and if he’s called a racist and misogynist, as he is in this latest attempt to demonize him, then nobody is safe. After all, Pinker is a liberal Democrat who’s donated a lot of dosh to the Democratic Party, and relentlessly preaches a message of moral, material, and “well-being” progress that’s been attained through reason and adherence to Enlightenment values. But that sermon alone is enough to render him an Unperson, for the Woke prize narrative and “lived experience” over data, denigrate reason, and absolutely despise the Enlightenment."

"The GOP, with 100+ of its Congresspeople joining the crazy Texas lawsuit trying to overturn the election, has become a swarming beehive of truthers, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, gun nuts."

"Christianity, and religion in general, is dying in America. (The exceptions are an increase in Islam, probably due to immigration, and in Buddhism, a basically godless religion.) The decline is due largely to a loss of faith among young people, as we’ve seen several times before. Religion wanes one corpse at a time."

"Isn’t it time for us to stop taking this nonsense seriously? I regard panpsychists as I regard theologians: they both make stuff up, none of what they say is testable, and they both actually get paid to foist nonsense on the world."

"If “wokeness” is in some sense equivalent to “making useless performative gestures that at the same time show what a good person you are,” then land acknowledgments are its apogee. They are performances not for Native Americans, but for others who were also complicit in the theft. Put up or shut up. And if you really think you’re responsible for stealing land, give it back—or pay for it."

"Religion and xenophobia go together like hot dogs and mustard."

"But grifters gotta grift, so we’ll always have tarot, psychics, and other scammers."

"A lot of activism, of course, is sincere activism, and I see instances of that all the time. Some of my best friends from college are dedicated to true “social justice”, and have spent their lives doing social work, teaching English to immigrants, deliberately teaching in minority schools, and so on. But what distinguishes “wokeness” from genuine social justice advocates is that the woke are engaged in a performance—usually involved in showing what good people they are, and what a good tribe they belong to."

"Biblical scholarship is useful as a form of historical inquiry and literary exegesis, while theology is a remnant of our childhood as a species, a vestigial belief that’s the mental equivalent of adults holding blankets and sucking their thumbs."

"So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve."

"The man has no conception of what empirical evidence really is, so strong is his will to believe."

"I continue to be amazed at how much dust is stirred up by simply asserting the biological observation that, in animals and vacular plants, there are but two sexes, and those sexes are defined by the reproductive equipment they have. Males are “designed” (I’m speaking teleologically: “evolved” is what I mean) to make small, mobile gametes, and females to make big immobile ones. For decades this has been uncontroversial: A truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen. Now, however, for reasons known best to themselves, a small but vocal group of ideologues is denying the sex binary. In my coauthored paper coming out in late June, we hazard some guesses, but those of you following the controversy probably realize that it involves trying to impose one’s ideological views onto nature. This doesn’t work so easily with the sex binary, as even nonscientists can observe it with their own eyes. The result is that deniers of that binary, such as Agustín Fuentes and Laura Helmuth (editor of Scientific American who’s published several pieces denying a sex binary), face considerable pushback from both scientists—who work with male and female organisms—and “regular” people, who have eyes to see and neurons to analyze."

"The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence."

"There are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists."

"I would add that the kowtowing towards the excesses of Islam by many Westerners is craven, patronizing, and evinces “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” How dare Westerners excuse or ignore the behavior of countries that execute gays, atheists, and apostates, oppress women and deny them education, and force women to wear coverings so as not to excite the presumably uncontrollable lust of men, while at the same time demonizing Israel, which does none of these things. It’s because Arabs, even if genetically similar to Israelis, are seen as “people of color”, while Israelis are seen as “white adjacent.” It’s as if implied pigmentation conferred virtue! These differential views of Arab versus Jewish states constitute one of the most pernicious aspects of Authoritarian Leftism and Wokeism."

"But why was the name “James Webb Space Telescope” attacked by Prescod-Weinstein and others? Because of the accusation that, as head of NASA, Webb allowed the demonization of gay employees and oversaw a purge of them from the agency. But as even the NYT reported (October 2022), those accusations are completely false. Will the Offended Woke Physicists give up in light of the evidence and shut their pie-holes about Webb? No, they will not. They still want the name “Webb” effaced. It’s insane. The main reason I think this is a tempest in a teapot is because this renaming accomplishes nothing: it is purely performative, which is why it’s woke, and ludicrously so."

"One of the purposes of a university is to find the truth, but that can’t be done if free discussion is banned."

"But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to the PERFORMATIVE AND NON-EFFECTIVE PRETENSE of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it, It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?"

"How embarrassing is it, given the situation, that the SSE, the ASN, and the SSB got their biology wrong while the Trump administration got it right! But that’s what happens when scientific societies get ideologically captured."

"It’s funny, but telling, that those who claim that sex is a spectrum or continuum never specify how many sexes there are, either in humans or other species. I suspect that if they responded—based on their “multivariate, multidimensional” definition of sex—that “there are many, many sexes,” or “I can’t answer that”, they would be laughed out of the house. But we all know that that the “spectrum” people are not dumb or willfully ignorant. They are simply imbued with a certain ideology."

"I really dislike land acknowledgments because they’re purely performative. They are there to make the issuer look progressive and moral, but they accomplish exactly nothing. And that is what “woke” means."

"The whole brouhaha serves to demonstrate that “cancel culture”—the attempt to ruin someone’s career if they transgress “progressive” ideological stands—is alive and well."

"No, if there is to ever be a two-state solution, the Palestinian side cannot be run by anyone with a history of sponsoring terrorism. And Palestinian leaders like that are hard to find."

"Well, those opposing extreme gender ideology may be fomenting things, but it’s not because we’re white, religious, or nationalistic. And have these organizations ever considered that there may be many black people or Hispanics who also oppose gender activism? One might even say that blaming all this stuff on white people is a form of racism."

"Keeping budgets secret is what universities do."

"In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then. But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one. Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters. But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god."

"I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”"

"Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design."

"The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition."

"This book lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution. For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason."

"It’s clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion."

"We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix."

"Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created."

"The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist."

"We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy."

"If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific."

"If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator."

"Because of the hegemony of fundamentalist religion in the United States, this country has been among the most resistant to the fact of human evolution."

"Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism."

"Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go."

"We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured out how we came to be."

"A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator."

"Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality."

"It didn’t take long to realize the futility of using evidence to sell evolution to Americans, for faith led them to discount and reject the facts right before their noses."

"I was flabbergasted. How could it be that someone found evidence convincing but was still not convinced? The answer, of course, was that his religion had immunized him against my evidence."

"Science and religion, then, are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe. In this goal religion has failed miserably, for its tools for discerning “truth” are useless. These areas are incompatible in precisely the same way, and in the same sense, that rationality is incompatible with irrationality."

"Understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don’t, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith. That is attested by the acknowledged success of science in telling us about everything from the smallest bits of matter to the origin of the universe itself—compared with the abject failure of religion to tell us anything about gods, including whether they exist."

"One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion."

"I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I’ll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. I’ll have achieved my aim If the public stops awarding special authority about the universe and the human condition to preachers, imams, and clerics simply because they are religious figures. And above all, I’ll have achieved my aim if, when you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” you see it as criticism rather than praise."

"If religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers?"

"Ironically, as the credibility of creationists grows smaller, their voices get louder."

"After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?"

"I could go on, but the point is clear: religions make explicit claims about reality—about what exists and happens in the universe. These claims involve the existence of gods, the number of such gods (polytheism or monotheism), their character and behavior (usually loving and beneficent, but, in the case of Hindu and ancient Greek gods, sometimes mischievous or malevolent), how they interact with the world, whether or not there are souls or life after death, and, above all, how the deities wish us to behave—their moral code. These are empirical claims, and although some may be hard to test, they must, like all claims about reality, be defended with a combination of evidence and reason. If we find no credible evidence, no good reasons to believe, then those claims should be disregarded, just as most of us ignore claims about ESP, astrology, and alien abduction. After all, beliefs important enough to affect you for eternity surely deserve the closest scrutiny."

"The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?"

"Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge."

"“The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”"

"Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves."

"In other words, truth is simply what is: what exists in reality and can be verified by rational and independent observers."

"“What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.”"

"Claims of supernatural phenomena like the efficacy of prayer are rendered unfalsifiable by the assertion that “God will not be tested.” (Of course, if the tests had been successful, then testing God would have been fine!)"

"In the end, a theory that can’t be shown to be wrong can never be shown to be right."

"Living with uncertainty is hard for many people, and is one of the reasons why people prefer religious truths that are presented as absolute."

"Although scientists come in all faiths, including no faith at all, there is no Hindu science, no Muslim science, and no Jewish science. There is only science, combining brainpower from the whole world to produce one accepted body of knowledge. In contrast, there are thousands of religions, most differing profoundly in what they see as “true.”"

"These (i. e., the statements of the Nicene Creed) are all empirical statements about reality: they are either true or false, even if some are hard to investigate. These claims, of course, absolutely conflict with those of other faiths. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Muslims believe that those who do so will spend eternity in hell. Doesn’t choosing among such faiths require a way to evaluate whether this dogma is true?"

"You can find some religions without creationism, but you can’t find creationism without religion."

"The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself."

"My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. “Knowledge” acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion’s methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality."

"In the end, religious investigations of “truth,” unlike those of science, are deeply dependent on confirmation bias. You start with what you were taught to believe, or what you want to believe, and then accept only those facts that support your prejudices. This is the basis for the theological practice of “apologetics,” designed to defend religion against counterarguments and disconfirming evidence....In contrast, science has no apologetics, for we test our conclusions by trying to find counterevidence."

"The most important component of the incompatibility between science and religion is religion’s dependence on faith."

"Theologians intensely dislike the definition of faith as belief without—or in the face of—evidence, for that practice sounds irrational. But it surely is, as is any system that requires supporting a priori beliefs without good evidence. In religion, but not science, that kind of faith is seen as a virtue."

"“Blasphemy” and “heresy” are terms of religion, not science."

"In fact, changes like the elimination of limbo don’t come from new information, but from secular currents in society that make church dogma seem insupportable or even barbaric."

"Just as many churches don’t want to be seen as rejecting science, neither do they wish to lag too far behind public morality, and so they often tweak their religious “truths” to reflect the zeitgeist."

"But all that changed when Darwin explained those designlike features by natural selection. The best evidence for God simply vanished."

"One can’t read a great deal of theology without appreciating the mental dexterity of its practitioners when faced with hard problems. And as a scientist, I regret how much more we’d understand about nature had that dexterity been applied to science instead, or to any field involved in studying what’s real."

"Most of the world’s believers reject these claims (i. e., of Scientology, Mormonism, and Christian Science) as blatantly false. But that’s only because these three religions are fairly new. They were founded in the last two centuries, and we see their origin not as divine but as obvious fabrications of humans—in the case of Joseph Smith, of a con man. But if you look with equally critical eyes at the doctrines of older faiths, their tenets seem equally bizarre."

"To a very large extent, which religion you accept and which you reject are accidents of birth. And after you’ve been religious for years, and surrounded by those who believe likewise, you become emotionally invested in your faith’s truth. This makes you more susceptible to confirmation bias and less likely to be skeptical about your beliefs."

"The different claims among these faiths have consequences, for they’ve produce endless misery over the course of history....Clearly, religions aren’t incompatible only with science: they’re incompatible with one another....This farrago of conflicting and irresolvable claims about reality stands in stark contrast to science."

"What I am saying is two things. First, religion hasn’t obviously come closer to understanding the divine....I also claim that insofar as theology or religious beliefs do change within a faith, those changes are driven largely by either science or changes in secular culture....Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality."

"The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth."

"Our reliance on naturalism, then, is not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience—the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science."

"If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they’re talking about God."

"It’s important to realize that philosophical naturalism is, like atheism, a provisional view. It’s not the kind of worldview that says, “I know there is no god,” but the kind that says, “Until I see some evidence, I don’t accept the existence of gods.”"

"Science in fact has a lot to say about the supernatural. It can and has tested it, and so far has found no evidence for it....Indeed, over its history science has repeatedly investigated supernatural claims and, in principle, could find strong evidence for them. But that evidence hasn’t appeared."

"Theists’ typical response to these failures (i. e., of prayer to affect rates of healing) is to say either “God won’t let himself be tested” or “That’s not what prayer is about: it’s simply a way to converse with God.” But you can bet that had these studies shown a large positive effect, the religious would be noisily flaunting this as evidence for God. The confirmation bias shown by accepting positive results but explaining away negative ones is an important difference between science and religion."

"This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. But if no conceivable evidence can shake your faith in a theistic God, then you’ve deliberately removed yourself from rational discourse. In other words, your faith has trumped science."

"Hume was right about one thing: to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources. No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards."

"In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can’t be tested, it can be ignored."

"It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God’s nature and works become silent when asked about God’s methods."

"That doesn’t mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they’ll accept it."

"When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity. Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?...Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading. Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question."

"Of course, atheism, which is merely the lack of belief in gods, isn’t responsible for explaining altruism and ethics, a task that properly belongs to philosophy, science, and psychology. And those areas have offered plenty of nonreligious explanations for the “Moral law” and altruism. The explanations involve evolution, reason, and education."

"So if morality is innate, it’s certainly malleable."

"The rapid change in many aspects of morality, even in the last century, also suggests that much of its “innateness” comes not from evolution but from learning. That’s because evolutionary change simply doesn’t occur fast enough to explain societal changes like our realization that women are not an inferior moiety of humanity, or that we shouldn’t torture prisoners. The explanation for these changes must reside in reason and learning: our realization that there is no rational basis for giving ourselves moral privilege over those who belong to other groups."

"But some of our moral behaviors, if not sentiments, almost certainly evolved. Evidence for that comes from finding parallels between the behavior of our own species and that of our relatives."

"But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn’t explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has."

"While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there’s a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn’t find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of “true beliefs”: beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn’t mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs."

"It doesn’t trivialize morality to argue that it is based on evolution and secular reason."

"When one has a religious experience, what is “true” is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality."

"Can you prove that leprechauns don’t live in my garden? Well, not absolutely, but if you never see one, and they have no effects, than you can provisionally conclude that they don’t exist. And so it is with all the fanciful features and creatures we firmly believe don’t exist."

"Putting all this together, we see that religion is like Sagan’s invisible dragon. The missing evidence for any god is simply too glaring, and the special pleading too unconvincing, to make its existence anything more than a logical possibility. It’s reasonable to conclude, provisionally but confidently, that the absence of evidence for God is indeed evidence for his absence."

"Science’s results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we’ve devised to understand the universe."

"The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with its vernacular use as “confidence based on experience” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion."

"The orderliness of nature—the so-called set of natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation."

"Accommodationists further accuse scientists of having “faith in reason.” Yet reason is not an a priori assumption, but a tool that’s been shown to work. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason, and we use it because it produces results and progressive understanding... Reason is simply the way we justify our beliefs, and if you’re not using it, whether you’re justifying religious or scientific beliefs, you deserve no one’s attention."

"Isn’t science, as some maintain, based on a “faith” that it’s good to pursue the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a preference: we prefer to know the truth because accepting what’s false doesn’t give us useful answers about the universe."

"Every bit of truth clawed from nature over the last four centuries has involved completely ignoring God, for even religious scientists park their faith at the laboratory door."

"As the journalist Nick Cohen noted about accusations that atheism is like religion, “It’s not a charge I’d throw around if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause ‘like a religion,’ they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents.”"

"Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion’s linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God’s will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else’s depends on adherence to conduct mandated by your religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom God’s nature as limited, and don’t accept the notion of a heaven or hell, the certainty of religious dogma is ar more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science. This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people’s private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree."

"For good people to do evil doesn’t require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent."

"Science has a huge advantage over “other ways of knowing”: built-in methods of self-correction."

"But none of this criticism of science makes religion even a tiny bit more credible... In contrast, religion has never been right in its claims about the universe—at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we’ll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally."

"The harm, as I’ve said repeatedly, comes not from the existence of religion itself, but from its reliance on and glorification of faith—belief, or, if you will, “trust” or “confidence”—without supporting evidence. And faith, as employed in religion (and in most other areas), is a danger to both science and society. The danger to science is in how faith warps the public understanding of science: by arguing, for instance, that science is based just as strongly on faith as is religion; by claiming that revelation or the guidance of ancient books is just as reliable a guide to truth about our universe as are the tools of science; by thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than on what stands the test of empirical study."

"Religion has no warrant and no method for decreeing what is and what is not beyond science."

"Medicine can cure; faith cannot."

"Above all, religion, faith healing, and alternative medicine all show the diagnostic feature of faith: an agenda not to find the truth, but to support one’s biases, emotions, and personal beliefs."

"The first argument, that religion is a social necessity and will always be with us, is dubious. It can be demolished with only two words: northern Europe."

"I’m not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems."

"Religion has nothing to tell scientists that can improve their trade. Indeed, the progress of science has required shedding all vestiges of religion, whether those be the beliefs themselves or religious methods for finding “truth.” We do not need those hypotheses."

"What might be considered a real contribution of science to religious belief is the empirical demonstration that some of those beliefs are wrong."

"I have argued that religion is to science as superstition is to reason; indeed, that is the very reason they are incompatible."

"In the end, why isn’t it better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago?"

"It is time to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term “person of faith” as a compliment."

"A world that is faithless would not be without the arts, either. Those don’t rest on faith, so imaginative art, literature, and music would still be with us. Too, we would retain justice, law, and compassion, perhaps in even greater measure than now, for our judgment wouldn’t be warped by adherence to unevidenced divine strictures."

"Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most “religious” morality."

"Coyne is also s special kind of scientist---one who accepts some things on faith himself! Most important is "determinism," when means that all of reality as we know it evolves completely deterministically according to physical laws."

"Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table."

"I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you."

"I could trace own EST brainwave to a flight back from a trip to Japan. But, of course, great ideas are often simultaneously conceived by several people who have responded in a similar way to the climate of thinking, and it can be hard to pin down when and precisely how a flash of inspiration is born. Kaplan had taught me that good ideas are a dime of dozen for a smart person, and the only thing that distinguishes good from great is in how an idea is executed—how it becomes reality. Scientific history is littered with stories of one person having an idea but not following through on it only to see another have a similar inspiration and then prove it to be valid."

"At the hearing I not only described the EST method and the rapid rate of human gene discovery but also voiced by concerns about NIH's patent efforts, a subject I was glad to get out in the open. The room went quiet as many were startled by this discovery and then Watson suddenly shouted that it was "sheer lunacy" to file such patents, adding that "virtually any monkey" could use the EST method and that he was "horrified." As Cook-Deegan, a Duke University genome discussant, described the event, "Watson was lying in wait and took aim with heavy artillery." Cook-Deegan, who was Watson's assistant at the time, told me later that Watson had practiced the lines for a week prior to the hearing."

"Tenure actually delivers a doubly whammy to the organizations that endure this outmoded arrangement. The second-rate people who thrive in a tenured environment like nothing more than to surround themselves with more mediocrity and drive out those who might excel and reveal the shortcomings of the entrenched."

"Emotions are triggered by what we like to call emotionally competent stimuli, that is, objects or situations that can be real, like in front of you, or be in your mind when you think and you recall, and they act on brain devices that were designed by evolution."

"When you have an emotion you are recruiting a variety of mechanisms that came in the long history of evolution, long before emotions arose, and those mechanisms all had to do with how an organism manages its life."

"There are three levels of self to consider: the proto, the core, and the autobiographical. The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species."

"General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems."

"In 1978 when the book Living Systems was published, it contained the prediction that the sciences that were concerned with biological and social sciences would, in the future, be stated as rigorously as the “hard sciences” that study such nonliving phenomenon as temperature, distance, and the interaction of chemical elements. Principles of Quantitative Living Systems Science, the first of a planned series of three books, begins an attempt to fulfill that prediction... It is our opinion that this book represents an important step in the development of a quantitative living systems science... As Simms shows, the concepts of available energy and the capacity to direct energy, as well as the causative relationship between information and behavior, are useful in the analysis of behavior... The systems with which this first book of the series is concerned are mainly at the level of the cell and the animal organ and organism.... It will be interesting to see how the science is applied in later volumes to the complex behaviors of human being, and higher level systems."

"The universe of all things that exist may be understood as a universe of systems where a system is defined as any set of related and interacting elements. This concept is primitive and powerful and has been used increasingly over the last half-century to organize knowledge in virtually all domains of interest to investigators. As human inventions and social interactions grow more complex, general conceptual frameworks that integrate knowledge among different disciplines studying those emerging systems grow more important. Living systems theory (LST) instructs integrative research among biological and social sciences and related academic disciplines."

"General systems theory is a set of related definitions, assumptions, and propositions which deal with reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy. General systems behavior is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones. Even more basic to this presentation than the concept of "system" are the concepts of "space," "time," "matter," "energy," and "information," because the living systems which I shall discuss exist in space and are made of matter and energy organized by information."

"In the most general mathematical sense, a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulates."

"More concrete, physical space is the extension surrounding a point. It may be thought of as either the compass of the entire universe or some region of such a universe."

"Scientific observers often view living systems as existing in spaces which they conceptualize or abstract from the phenomena with which they deal. Examples of such spaces are:"

"# Pecking order in birds or other animals."

"# Social class space..."

"# among ethnic or racial groups."

"# Political distance among political parties of the right and left."

"# The life space of Lewin, - the environment as seen by the subject, including the field forces or valences between him and objects in the environment, which can account for his immediately subsequent behavior."

"# Osgood's semantic space as determined by subjects' ratings of words on the semantic differential test."

"# Sociometric space, e.g., the rating on a scale of leadership ability of each member of a group by every other member."

"# A space of time costs of various modes of transportation, e.g., travel taking longer on foot than by air, longer upstream than down."

"# A space representing the shortest distances for messages to travel..."

"# A space of frequency of trade relations among nations."

"# A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups."

"My analysis of living systems uses concepts of thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics, and systems engineering, as well as the classical concepts appropriate to each level. The purpose is to produce a description of living structure and process in terms of input and output, flows through systems, steady states, and feedbacks, which will clarify and unify the facts of life."

"In such fundamental considerations it would be surprising if many new concepts appear, for countless good minds have worked long on these matters over many years. Indeed, new original ideas should at first be suspect, though if they withstand examination they should be welcomed. My intent is not to create a new school or art form but to discern the pattern of a mosaic which lies hidden in the cluttered, colored marble chips of today's empirical facts."

"My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstract space... The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving... Physical space is a common space because it is the only space in which all concrete systems, living and nonliving, exist (though some may exist in other spaces simultaneously). Physical space is shared by all scientific observers, and all scientific data must be collected in it. This is equally true for natural science and behavioral science."

"The term system has a number of meanings. There are systems of numbers and of equations, systems of value and of thought, systems of law, solar systems, organic systems, management systems, command and control systems, electronic systems, even the Union Pacific Railroad system. The meanings of "system" are often confused. The most general, however, is: A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them. The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units."

"The structure of a system is the arrangement of its subsystems and components in three-dimensional space at a given moment of time. This always changes over time. It may remain relatively fixed for a long period or it may change from moment to moment, depending upon the characteristics of the process in the system. This process halted at any given moment, as when motion is frozen by a high-speed photograph, reveals the three-dimensional spatial arrangement of the system's components as of that instant."

"The most general form of systems theory is a set of logical or mathematical statements about all conceptual systems. A subset of this concerns all concrete systems. A subsubset concerns the very special and very important living systems, i.e., general living systems theory."

"James G. Miller, a psychologist and medical doctor, wrote a large book, Living Systems, which is a discussion of matter, energy, and information processes. Miller saw systems as having 19 critical subsystems at each level: cell, organ, organism, group, corporation, nation, and supranational organization. One distinguishing feature of Miller’s work is his treatment of information."

"In a life-long partnership with his wife Jessie, James Grier Miller contributed substantially to the development of and to the integration of disciplines through general systems theory, remaining actively engaged in these areas throughout his working life. From his early work on the human brain in the 1940s, Miller worked for over 60 years within influential circles to foster a wide range of new endeavours. In 1949, as Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago, he founded the new field of behavioural science, devoted to the theoretical integration of the biological and social sciences, through the establishment of the influential Committee on Behavioral Science. In 1955, he got funding from the State of Michigan to set up the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan; and in 1967, he became President of the University Louisville where he established a Systems Science Institute. His comprehensive integration of the sciences, in Living Systems (1978), remains core to the study of Living Systems and many other fields of research and practice within the systems community."

"Miller’s scientific and professional activities have centered around the single theme of integrating knowledge about biological and social systems. But there have been great changes over the years. His early approach to science, under the influence of Whitehead, was a mixture of philosophy and experimentation. His current research relates modern information processing technologies to living systems. The basic research consists of quantitative studies of cross-level identities among multiple levels of systems. The applications extend from the use of artificial intelligence ‘expert systems’ to measure matter, energy, and information flows in living systems to the development of an electronic University of the world."

"Three unique and still timely aspects of Miller's text Living Systems were his citation of 173 specific ‘cross-level’ hypotheses, his unification of a vast number of phenomena from the biomedical sciences to the social sciences using a consistent taxonomy of seven hierarchical levels and 20 subsystems, and his consistent effort to make systems hypotheses more testable."

"Stephen Jay Gould is extremely bright, inventive. He thoroughly understands paleontology; he thoroughly understands evolutionary biology. He has performed an enormous service in getting people to think about punctuated equilibrium, because you see the process of stasis/sudden change, which is a puzzle. It's the cessation of change for long periods of time. Since you always have mutations, why don't things continue changing? You either have to say that the particular form is highly adapted, optimal, and exists in a stable environment, or you have to be very puzzled. Steve has been enormously important in that sense. Talking with Steve, or listening to him give a talk, is a bit like playing tennis with someone who's better than you are. It makes you play a better game than you can play. For years, Steve has wanted to find, in effect, what accounts for the order in biology, without having to appeal to selection to explain everything—that is, to the evolutionary "just-so stories." You can come up with some cockamamie account about why anything you look at was formed in evolution because it was useful for something. There is no way of checking such things. We're natural allies, because I'm trying to find sources of that natural order without appealing to selection, and yet we all know that selection is important."

"Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it."

"The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not. A biosphere, or an econosphere, self-consistently coconstructs itself according to principles we do not yet fathom."

"It would be a triumph to find universal laws of organization for life, ecosystems, and biospheres. The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone."

"The famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have remarked that the deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image."

"The onset of evolutionism brought with it the concept of branching phylogenies. The branching image, so clear and succinct, has come to underlie all our thinking about organisms and evolution."

"Living systems exist in the solid regime near the edge of chaos, and natural selection achieves and sustains such a poised state."

"Evolution is not just "chance caught on the wing". It is not just a tinkering of the ad hoc, of bricolage, of contraption. It is emergent order honored and honed by selection."

"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."

"Life does not depend on the magic of Watson-Crick base pairing or any other specific template-replicating machinery. Life lies ... in the property of catalytic closure among a collection of molecular species"

"If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order. Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all."

"One of the most important presuppositions of Darwin's entire thesis is gradualism, the idea that mutations to the genome can cause minor variations in the organism's properties, which can be accumulated piecemeal, bit by bit, over the eons to create the complex order found in the organisms we observe."

"In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive. For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?"

"As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition. My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time."

"Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as a key to an information storage system... Is the classification that is soundest as a basis of generalizations also most convenient for information retrieval? This, indeed, seems to have been true in most cases I have encountered."

"Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation."

"According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another"

"I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. Darwin argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others... I noted that you are never going to find evidence of a small local populatlon that changed very rapidly in the fossil record... Gould was my course assistant at Harvard where I presented this theory again and again for three years. So he knew it thoroughly. So did Eldredge. In fact, in his 1971 paper Eldredge credited me with it. But that was lost over time."

"Having reached the rare age of 100 years, I find myself in a unique position: I'm the last survivor of the golden age of the Evolutionary Synthesis. That status encourages me to present a personal account of what I experienced in the years (1920s to the 1950s) that were so crucial in the history of evolutionary biology."

"Life is simply the reification of the process of living."

"The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian"

"The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years"

"This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity."

"A thousand fools believe a lie, and it’s good as truth."

"She tended to keep her eyes half closed, as if full sight of the world’s absurdity might be too much to bear."

"“People fear stone,” Usha said, “because it contains never-life.” “Non-life? You mean, death?” “Nonsense,” she repeated vehemently. “What’s to fear about death? Death is natural. Stone is never-life.” Spinel took another tack. “If they fear it, then how come enough Sharers want it so the traders stock shelves full?” “How should I know? Why do Valans drink the toxic waste product of sugar-eating yeast?”"

"Few fears are rational."

"A life postponed too long might never be lived."

"Of all the well-meant emotions pity is the cruelest to share."

"“Magic is nonsense.” “Magic is anything you don’t understand.”"

"Usha had said that males were not all that different, just bigger outside to make up for what they lacked within."

"Death can be hastened but never shared."

"There was no time for bitterness now: eat bitterness, and bitterness eats you."

"Death hastens those who hasten death."

"You are as responsible for what you let happen as for the actions you share."

"She watched the indigo sky, and the stars coming out tranquil as ever, as if this were any ordinary evening. Only humans knew what an evil time this was."

"If every planet in the Patriarchy refused to be ruled, we all would be free."

"“I can’t change what I am ovenight.” “Nor can I. And yet, one can’t stop changing, either.”"

"The skin is impossibly wet, a cloud condensed into animate matter."

"We can find our way back to thoughtful management for the long-term well-being of both humans and forests. But finding this way will require some quiet and humility."

"When laughing children chase after fireflies, they are not pursuing beetles but catching wonder.When wonder matures, it peels back experience to seek deeper layers of marvel below. This is science's highest purpose."

"Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. … To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical."

"Our sensitivity to the tone, hue, and intensity of light is bound up with our evolutionary heritage. Even the diversity of our visual abilities may echo our ancestors' ecology."

"Storms in the forest have a more primal character than storms playing over tamed urban land. A vigorous cloudburst is exhilarating, a burst of sensory delight with its leafy smells, gray light, and chill. But a full tree-ripping storm pushes the senses beyond exhilaration or thrill, into fear."

"The study of twigs seems esoteric. But this impression is dangerously wrong. Counting back through bud scars, tallying yearly growth, I not only see the struggle among native and foreign trees, I read the ledger of the world's atmosphere."

"The old "red in tooth and claw" view of the natural economy has to be updated. We need a new metaphor for the forest, one that helps us visualize plants both sharing and competing. … Evolution's engine is fired by genetic self-interest, but this manifests itself in cooperative action as well as solo selfishness. The natural economy has as many trade unions as robber barons, as much solidarity as individualistic entrepreneurship."

"The physical structures of organisms play only a minor and secondary role... The only requirement which physical structure must fulfill is that it allow the characteristic behaviors themselves to be manifested. Indeed, if this were not so, it would be impossible to understand how a class of systems as utterly diverse in physical structure as that which comprises biological organisms could be recognised as a unity at all."

"I do not consider myself a philosopher. I am a biologist, attempting to grapple with the Schrodinger question, “What is Life?” It turns out that this is not an empirical question, to be resolved through observation in a laboratory."

"On balance, the cartesian metaphor of organism as machine has proved to be a good idea. Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way."

"Perhaps the first lesson to be learned from biology is that there are lessons to be learned from biology."

"The point of departure is the measurement problem, as it appears in physics; the manner in which measurements allow us to characterize subsystems; the role of such subsystems as tools in system analysis; and the relationships existing between different ways of perceiving or interacting with the same system. Our conclusions are: (1) there exists no universal family of analytic units appropriate for the treatment of all interactions; (2) there are on the contrary many such families of analytic units, all of which are equally “real” and entitled to be treated on the same footing; (3) the appropriate use of natural interactions can enormously extend the class of physical observables accessible to us; (4) the concept of a model must be formulated, in its most general terms, as the sharing of a subsystem by two otherwise distinct systems, capable of imposing the same dynamic on an appropriate system with which they can both interact. We establish these results through a variety of terminologies which turn out to be equivalent: stability, invariance, symmetry, homeostasis."

"It is essential to realize at this point that the formalism to be developed, although we cast it initially primarily in the framework of natural systems, is in fact applicable to any situation in which a class of objects is associated with real numbers, or in fact classified or indexed by any set whatever. It is thus applicable to any situation in which classification, or recognition, or discrimination is involved; indeed, one of the aims of our formalism is to point up the essential equivalence of the measurement problem in physics with all types of recognition or classification mechanisms based on observable properties of the objects being recognized or classified."

"For a long time, people have been trying to characterize or define the notion of system. After all, “systems” are supposed to be what System Theory is about. The results so far have been contradictory and unsatisfactory. This confusion at the foundations has led many to conclude that there is no such thing as a "system" and hence to deny that System Theory is about anything. Even those most sympathetic to the notion have difficulties at this level. The very founders of System Theory did not try to say what a system was; and as for System Theory, they characterized it only obliquely, by saying it comprised all studies of interest to more than one discipline. They thereby begged the entire question."

"Let us begin by observing that the word "system" is almost never used by itself; it is generally accompanied by an adjective or other modifier: physical system; biological system; social system; economic system; axiom system; religious system; and even "general" system. This usage suggests that, when confronted by a system of any kind, certain of its properties are to be subsumed under the adjective, and other properties are subsumed under the "system," while still others may depend essentially on both. The adjective describes what is special or particular; i.e., it refers to the specific "thinghood" of the system; the "system" describes those properties which are independent of this specific "thinghood.""

"Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides—that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist—but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development."

"When I had felt compelled by increasing knowledge of nature to revise some of my traditional articles of religious faith, I was delighted to find that these changes had not modified in any essential respects my system of ethics. As I expressed it in my presidential address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1937: "The ethics of science regards the search for truth as one of the highest duties of man; it regards noble human character as the finest product of evolution; it considers the service of all mankind as the universal good; it teaches that human nature and humane nurture may be improved, that reason may replace unreason, cooperation supplement competition, and the progress of the human race through future ages be promoted by intelligence and goodwill.""

"The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory."

"Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis."

"A man of vigorous, definite, judicial, but amiable personality. It seems almost unnecessary to attempt to put into words a characterization of one so well known to zoologists of this country. He is easy to meet, interested in those with whom he comes in contact, and gifted with a good memory for names and faces. A genuine sense of humor crops out unexpectedly to illuminate many a situation, as in his famous remark that 'wooden legs are not inherited, although wooden heads may be' or his equally well-known observation in regard to the anti-evolutionists, 'Apparently the anti-evolutionist expects to see a monkey or an ass transformed into a man, though he must be familiar enough with the reverse process."

"Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number."

"I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals... very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity. By "codifying ignorance" I refer in part to the fact that they miss four of the five kingdoms of life... bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants."

"The oxygen crisis that began only two billion years ago prompted the evolution of respiring bacteria. These microbes that used oxygen to derive biochemical energy more efficiently than ever before eventually took over most of the world. Some of the oxygen-breathing bacteria became symbiotic, merging with different (oxygen-eschewing) bacteria to form nucleated cells, which, after becoming sexual, evolved into fungi, plants, and animals."

"[The smallest bacterium] is so much more like people than Stanley Miller’s mixtures of chemicals, because it already has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium."

"Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen... comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?"

"There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without regard for the individuals and species that compose it. More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct, but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, have continued for more than three billion years. ...trillions of communicating, evolving microbes. The visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm's activities."

"From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary "ladder," we are both surrounded by them and composed of them. Having survived in an unbroken line from the beginnings of life, all organisms today are equally evolved."

"The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest," dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networkiing. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them."

"Not only did life originate on earth very early in its history as a planet, but for the first two billion years, Earth was inhabited solely by bacteria."

"The fundamental division of forms of life on Earth is not that between plants and animals, as is commonly assumed, but between prokaryotes—organisms composed of cells with no nucleus, that is, bacteria—and eukaryotes—all other life forms."

"In the long run, the most vicious predators, like most dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation—the attack that doesn't kill or does kill only slowly—is a recurring theme in evolution. The predatory precursors of mitochondria invaded and exploited their hosts, but the prey resisted. Forced to be content with an expendable part of the prey (its waste)... some mitochondria precursors grew but never killed their providers. ...The original prey was probably a larger bacterium like Thermoplasma."

"The question "What is Life?" is... a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself."

"Soil is not unalive. It is a mixture of broken rock, pollen, fungal filaments, ciliate cysts, bacterial spores, nematodes and other microscopic animals and their parts. 'Nature,' Aristotle observed, 'proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.' Independence is a political, not a scientific, term."

"Life today is an autopoietic, photosynthetic phenomenon, planetary in scale. A chemical transmutation of sunlight, it exuberantly tries to spread, to outgrow itself. Yet by reproducing, it maintains itself and its past even as it grows. Life transforms to meet the contingencies of its changing environment and in doing so changes that environment. By degrees the environment becomes absorbed into the processes of life, becomes less a static, inanimate backdrop and more and more like a house, nest, or shell—that is, an involved, constructed part of an organic being."

"Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria have evolved from organisms that were. ...Gene exchanges were indispensable to those that would rid themselves of environmental toxins. ...Replicating gene-carrying plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny of bacteria. It still is."

"The scientific backgrounds and areas of expertise of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis turned out out to be a perfect match. Margulis had no problem answering Lovelock's many questions about biological origins of atmospheric gases, while Lovelock contributed concepts from chemistry, thermodynamics, and cybernetics to the emerging Gaia theory. Thus the two scientists were able gradually to identify a complex network of feedback loops that—bring about self-regulation of the planetary system."

"The confidence of Lynn Margulis in the idea of a planetary autopoietic web stems from three decades of pioneering work in microbiology. ...Margulis has not only contributed a great deal to that understanding within the scientific community but has also been able, in collaboration with Dorion Sagan, to explain her radical discoveries in clear and engaging language to the lay reader."

"In the minds of many people, she went around the powers that be and took her theories directly to the public, which annoyed them all. It particularly annoyed them because she turned out to be right. It's a sin to take your theories to the public, then it is a double sin to take your theories to the public and be right."

"Lynn pioneered some of the most important insights in modern evolutionary science, particularly regarding the role of symbiosis in the origin of evolutionary innovations. Hearing a scientific presentation by Lynn... was one of the mind-expanding events that led me into a career in science."

"Sagan's first wife, Lynn Margulis, was one of the principle architects of the Gaia Hypothesis. Put their viewpoints together, and the conclusion you would reach would be that nuclear war could have a significant enough effect that it could even kill Gaia."

"If she burned out in a sudden burst of hemorrhagic overactivity, like a blazing celestial object vanishing in its own glory, the end-blaze was not so different than the burning life, as she died near the height of her powers, at the peak of her coruscating personality."

"Her book Symbiosis in Cell Evolution is one of the classics of biology... In recent years, she has taken some of her important scientific ideas into a more cultural sphere... This is bad. Her story on the origins of sex, in Mystery Dance, written with Dorion Sagan, for example, is naive, full of clichés, and devoid of historical perspective. ...It's unfortunate that she has ventured into some weird second stage."

"A young Lynn Margulis fell in love with symbiosis—it was she who finally managed to precisely describe the stages in the process that lead bacteria to become eukaryotic cells—and was emboldened rather than dissuaded by criticism. ...Her seminal article, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells," was published in 1967... but only after being rejected fifteen times... thanks to her insistence... SET, or serial endosymbiosis theory—became accepted as true."

"The concept of the « struggle for existence » has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive Giom. in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions appear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge. Before we proceed with a discussion of the formation and activities of antibiotics under natural conditions, we must consider certain fundamental aspects of the problem of antibiotic production under controlled laboratory or factory conditions... All the discussion of a "struggle for existence" in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is merely a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual."

"We seem to have quite a few problems: global climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, collapsing fisheries, desertification, wealth inequality, species extinctions, freshwater shortages, hapless governments, deforestation, disease epidemics, and agricultural failures top the list. ...our civilizations have been in similar situations before ...a long list of civilizations from the Maya to the Romans all collapsed. The precedent is set..."

"We don't know exactly when out fossil fuels will run out... but by the end of the century, our oil and natural gas supplies will be virtually non-existent, and limited coal supplies will be restricted to only a handful of countries. ...We are at the peak of a remarkable two-hundred-year glitch in the history of civilization and are about to embark on the descent. The coming changes will be earth-shattering."

"The tragedy of the commons, explained by Garrett Hardin... shows how nonfunctional communities can rapidly destroy their own resource base. ...how good, rational people can form destructive communities. ...Instead of protecting their long-term future by conserving resources, they protect their short-term gains by competing, deplete their resources to the point of collapse, and bring about the failure of the community. ...again and again ..."

"I encourage people to look into the Transition Network."

"Millions are going to die of starvation and malnutrition... Food production will decline and food prices will rise when diesel (oil) and fertilizer (natural gas) become prohibitively expensive. The disastrous depletion of soil and water resources will become abundantly clear when we cannot afford to prop up production artificially."

"What farmers should aim for is... higher margins using fewer inputs on less land, and a system that is sustainable."

"America does not have to rely on vast volumes of oil and natural gas to make food. ...It has to get smarter. Dedicated, hard-working, ethical, and ingenious farmers ...show us it can be done. ...Another very promising trend in many countries is the reemergence of urban agriculture, community gardens, and backyard gardens."

"To combat the problems we face, we need to swim against the tide, and not only the main tide of environmentally blind industrialists, but also the secondary current of efficiency-blind environmentalists."

"Coral bleaching, the collapse of pine forests from bark beetle infestations, the destruction of Arctic habitat for animals... and the thawing of the Arctic permafrost are not future, theoretical impacts; they are disasters that we are watching unfold."

"Our government has been hijacked by big business."

"I find it hard to listen to fervent Republicans. Put the combined wisdom and honesty of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and a dozen others on the back of a postcard with a thick marker pen and you'll still have plenty of room for the address and stamp."

"A society that supports a wealthy few at the expense of the larger population is unlikely to persist."

"...the environment is master. Societies and economies are utterly dependent upon it."

"Nothing can sustain a system that is in overshoot... Resiliance... is not the strength to hold back the tide, but the strength to bend without breading as the tide inevitably rushes in."

"Decentralization will prevent shocks from spreading throughout the system, like firebreaks in the forest."

"You can feed a family on a quarter-acre lot if it comes down to it."

"We should stop subsidizing the fossil-fuel industries and instead provide subsidies for local and community energy projects."

"What I'm proposing... is for governments to peel back support for large businesses, especially extractive industries. Instead, governments should support small businesses. ...inhibit oversized energy and agricultural systems and promote smaller, localized ones."

"New technologies will not liberate us. Even if they do materialize they will not reduce our consumption of resources. They will not reduce our demand for energy. They will not diminish our impacts on the climate. And they will not bring about a better world."

"It is too late to slow this runaway train down before it tumbles into the chasm."

"Cellular systems, ecosystems, and civilizations are, at base, thermodynamic systems. ...The system uses energy, eventually releasing it as useless heat. ...there is one vital difference between natural systems and human systems: natural systems receive a fixed energy input that never varies. If we could set a strict limit on energy use, we could build a human system that is just as stable as an ecosystem."

"Fixed energy limits have not limited the progress of nature."

"Human systems always bring about their own demise... Natural systems... do not destroy themselves."

"To find our steady state and solve the sustainability puzzle, we need to abandon the relentless quest for dominance. We need to abandon our visions of progress as growth... Only progress in diversity, equality, and beauty can stand the test of time. We need to live within our limits."

"Most energy analysts would accept the core of the “efficiency trap” argument, namely, that greater efficiency... does not automatically mean lower consumption. On the contrary, greater efficiency can lead – and has led – to bigger products... and therefore to overall energy use that is just as high, if not higher, than before. ...but he gets carried away with blaming poor old efficiency for a whole manner of ills..."

"He moved inside the temple to perform his duties. They were few, and empty tradition. The god had departed, long before its last, ridiculed worshippers, as gods always do. The keeper knew that, and allowed himself no illusions about his status."

"You’d have everyone substitute your fantasies for their own."

"Jason was an optimist, and Kylis was experienced."

"She had learned to doubt, rather than simply to question."

"He must have been rebuffed and denigrated all his life, to be so afraid of touching another human being."

"She, too, felt the need for fresh air and rain and the ocean’s silent words."

"We spend most of our time carrying trivial cargoes for trivial reasons to trivial people."

"“It’s impossible to protect anyone completely without enslaving them. I think that’s something you’ve never understood because you’ve always demanded too much of yourself. You blame yourself for your sister’s death—” “I didn’t watch her carefully enough.” “What could you have done? Remember her life, not her death. She was brave and happy and arrogant, the way a child should be. You could only protect her more by chaining her to you with fear. She couldn’t live that way, not and remain the person you loved.”"

"He seemed to be so used to having his own way that he could not deal with bad fortune."

"If you want to. That’s the important thing. For you to do what you want to do. Not what you think anyone else wants or expects you to do."

"The intensity of Melissa’s loyalty troubled Snake. She had never known anyone who was so completely oblivious to self-interest. Perhaps Melissa could not yet think of herself as someone with a right to her own dreams; perhaps so many of her dreams had been taken from her that she no longer dared to have them."

"It was not fear that kept them from misusing what they had. It was self-respect."

"The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds."

"We have as much evidence that T. rex was feathered, at least during some stage of its life, as we do that australopithecines like Lucy had hair."

"Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living ancestor of birds, which is the crocodile. If you look at characteristics that birds and crocodiles have in common, the explanation is that the trait was in the common ancestor that birds and crocodiles had at one time."

"If you saw a baby tyrannosaur you would probably think it was a weird looking bird. A full grown one might have had feathers too, maybe not on its whole body though, maybe more of an ornamental display sort of feathers. So traits in the theropod dinosaurs were more birdlike than say, crocodiles."

"If you look at crocodiles today, they aren’t really representative of what the lineage of crocodiles look like. Crocodiles are represented by about 23 species, plus or minus a couple. Along that lineage the more primitive members weren’t aquatic. A lot of them were bipedal, a lot of them looked like little dinosaurs. Some were armored, others had no teeth. They were all fully terrestrial. So this is just the last vestige of that radiation that we’re seeing. And the ancestor of both dinosaurs and crocodiles would have, to the untrained eye, looked much more like a dinosaur."

"When people look of non-avian dinosaur they’re thinking of extrapolating a cow up to that size. Mammals are much much denser than birds are, because a lot of the skeletons of sauropods (the big, long-necked ones—Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus and the like) and theropod dinosaurs are just air. Theropods don’t have solid bones like we do; they have hollow bones. Sauropods don’t, but they have tremendous air sacs that fill up a lot of their bodies. And thus they weigh way less than a mammal scaled up to that size."

"A couple things that we do know about theropods—the ones that most closely related to birds—is that they brooded their nests. If you go deeper in the tree, what you see is that for sauropods, we have no direct evidence that they returned to the nest after the eggs were laid. Most of the evidence for that comes from an excavation in Argentina called Auca Mahuevo. What’s thought with sauropods is that they’d just lay a bunch of eggs and leave them alone—the turtle model. Few of those would ever reach adulthood."

"Believers in psychic phenomena — such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis — appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition... What is unique about the present is, that during the last 15 years, scarcely a single scientific paper has appeared attacking the work of the parapsychologists."

"A model that unifies all types of selection (chemical, sociological, genetical, and every other kind of selection) may open the way to develop a general ‘Mathematical Theory of Selection’ analogous to communication theory... Selection has been studied mainly in genetics, but of course there is much more to selection than just genetical selection... yet, despite the pervading importance of selection in science and life, there has been no abstraction and generalisation from genetical selection to obtain a general selection theory and general selection mathematics"

"For his groundbreaking insight into the evolution of altruism, Price merits a special place in the history of evolutionary biology. The painful irony is that his struggle to extinguish all selfish motives in his own life nearly prevented him from achieving it."

"Only the childish and immature mind can lose by learning that much in the Old Testament is poetical and that some of the stories are not true historically. Poetry is a superior medium for conveying religious truth."

"When we see men still so unhappily bound with prejudice and tradition that they are blind to the beauties and light of the grandest conception that science has yet won for man, we sorrow, and in sympathy again recall the plea that the unhappy Castelli made to the pope who was about to inflict punishment upon Galileo for his demonstration of the movements of the earth: "Your Holiness, nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from moving.""

"The savage mind finds mysterious and arbitrary spiritual powers everywhere, in rivers and springs, inherent in the wind and rain, and presiding over the crops; but, with advance in civilization and the development of ordered knowledge, an ever wider compass is established as the for the reign of natural laws. Those who base their faith in God on the ever-receding miraculous phenomena, on the tacit assumption that human limitations prove the validity of religious interpretations, are ever pointing out some weak spots in the scientific web of cause and effect and saying "Here Science is baffled, and you must admit the need of God." But Science keeps extending her domain; and so the history of the thought of these men is the history of a continuous retreat. Their position is fundamentally a bad one because it makes God a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance, and justifies Reinach's definition of religion as a "sum of scruples impeding the free use of the human faculties." No, the Creator must be seen as God of all Nature and of every natural law."

"(E)ven within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams."

"As long as we go back often to Nature herself, and practice the art of then forgetting for the time the fictions and hypotheses necessary in the partial treatments of our specialities,—as long as we thereby allow Nature and her facts to speak to us for themselves,—so long shall we, after each fresh contact, return to our labors with renewed strength and clarified vision."

"The history of human progress is a story of emancipation, and its course has by no means been run. The future of the race is in all likelihood to be a scientific future, since science gives the truth needed in actual life and furnishes the means for advance, every achievement enlarging the field of subsequent possibilities. Nothing can stop this growth except suppressions of freedom."

"Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles."

"If you can bring me one student whose faith I have injured in Mormonism, I will bring you five that you, through your narrowness, have driven out of the church."

"A patient bug-hunter who often remembers his classes.... Strong advocate of modern ideas and an authority on spiders and basket-ball. He sees with one eye what many do not see with two. "A man who worked while others slept.""

"He has been able to to lead the naive student with fixed religious convictions gently around that wide gulf that separated him from the trained scientific mind without pushing him over the precipice of despair and illusion."

"This man is no mere scholar, one of the common herd, but is a giant among his contemporaries. History will bear out that in his contributions to knowledge in the biological and other sciences he walks abreast of such great figures as Baird, Merriam, Gray, and others."

"He was one of the great figures in the university [of Utah]. As a matter of fact, Chamberlin was the university’s most celebrated scientist, world famous in entomology. I think his specialty was spiders. Now, I mention Chamberlin not simply because he was important as a scientist, though he certainly was, but because he was tremendously important in the intellectual life of Utah. He was at the center of the 1911 hassle over evolution at the BYU, in many ways the most important dispute in the intellectual history of Utah."

"Spiders are different from metaphysics, and I think Ralph was not such a devout Mormon."

"I was still under the malign influence of R. V. Chamberlin, an exemplar of minimal taxonomy."

"Ralph Vary Chamberlin was an influential presence in Arachnology... But Chamberlin was not a well-liked man. It appeared that Ernst Mayr banned him from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard in his later years."

"Biologist here!"

"Howdy! That's a great question, actually. The reason we fart is due to needing to periodically release gases that build up during digestion. During the digestion process of the foods you eat, naturally occurring beneficial bacteria in your body metabolize (i.e. convert the food in your body to useable energy) and produce waste as a result, some of which is the gas that makes up farts. This is typically where the methane (CH4) in farts comes from, the rest of the fart volume being from air swallowed during the course of the day. For animals like spiders and insects, there are similar processes! Some animals like termites, for example, better match us as they, too, have methane-producing bacteria in their guts which helps them break down wood! For other animals, other digestive processes make waste products and sometimes gas, so yes, spiders (and insects) do fart, in a sense! Since their exoskeletons are generally rigid, though, they may not produce the sound we associate with farting, thus, you might say that most spider and insect farts are "silent but deadly"!"

"Here's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?"

"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant."

"Some students at BYU perceive general education as an unfortunate burden that does little for them professionally. I was rudely awakened to this perception the first time that I taught Biology 100. Having loved biology my entire life, I assumed that all 250 students in my class would be as enthusiastic as I was to study biology. I quickly learned that most of my students dreaded having to take the course and had little interest in the sciences. My challenge was to help them learn to reverently admire the intricate wonders of God's creation that are evident when we study life. General education is especially important at BYU, for here a thoughtful study of the arts and sciences can be, in President Kimball's words, "bathed in the light and color of the restored gospel". Let me share with you a few of my own experiences."

"I have always felt a deep reverence for the intricacy and beauty of nature. While I was an undergraduate student at BYU, I fell in love with biology, especially with genetics. As I studied the biological and physical sciences, I came to view the creation of life in a much broader sense than before. I now view creation not as something that occurred long ago but as a process that continues today in which we are given the sacred privilege to participate. Through the study of biology we are able to gain a glimpse of how the earth and all of life was, and still is, created. Several scientists have shared this sense of wonder as they have spoken of the forest canopy as a great cathedral or of microbes, plants, and animals as God's creations with whom we share the earth. For example, Francis Collins, who is the director of the human genome project, one of the greatest scientific undertakings in history, said:"

"Vibrant human diversity is now commonplace in major cities throughout the world. Some celebrate such a mix of human diversity. Others deplore it, preferring that so-called races be separated both geographically and reproductively. Even today, some people retain the once-popular belief that the 'white' race is superior in intellect, health, and other attributes. Although far more people reject the notion of white supremacy today than in the past, its legacy remains, as evidenced by economic stratification, ongoing segregation, and classification by racial categories. Even among those who reject the supposed superiority of a particular ethnicity over any other, the perception of distinct, genetically determined human races often persists."

"Classification is real, but it is based much more on a set of social definitions than on genetic distinctions. Legally defined categories for race differ from one country to another, and they change over time depending largely on the social and political realities of a particular society or nation. The notion of discrete racial categories arose mostly as an artifact of centuries-long immigration history coupled with overriding worldviews that white superiority was inherent, a purported genetic destiny that has no basis in modern science."

"A better understanding of what science tells us about human genetic diversity is of immense importance, particualrly because it dispels false notions of what race is."

"Few features of humanity are as obvious as the wide array of inherited diversity visible in our outward features. It's also evident that people whose ancestry traces to a particular geographic region typically appear similar to one another and different from other geographic regions. Moreover, we as humans have an almost innate propensity to compartmentalize nearly everything into discrete categories, even when lines that distinguish those categories are complex, blurred, or nonexistent. As an inevitable consequence, people have been subjected to categorization into what we call human races throughout much of the past several centuries."

"Throughout the past several centuries, people have used the term race to describe groups of people in much the same way it was used in past centuries to describe groups of animals. People with ancestry from a particular region of tend to share certain inherited similar features, resembling their parents. However, the children of parents with substantially different ancestral backgrounds often have an appearance that is intermediate between that of their two parents, and in subsequent generations, the offspring may vary. In part because of the obvious similarities between animals and humans for how traits are inherited, and in part because of cultural, political, and religious traditions, notinos of racial purity and superiority have surged and ebbed yet persisted, crossing the boundaries of culture, geography, politics , and time. They are still with us today, and some of the most insidious actions based on notions of racial supremacy happened not long ago."

"Under the guise of eugenic improvement and racial purity, and what the implementation of eugenic measures could supposedly do to improve human society, notions of racial superiority continued in popularity, but with a purported scientific foundation."

"There are those who still believe that notions of racial purity are biologically and theologically sound, and therefore desirable, in spite of the fact that current genetic evidence has obliterated all justification for such notions."

"The world's most prominent human population geneticists have publicly criticized the people who claim genetic research supports the notion of biological races, and the unfounded inferences derived from that notion."

"So-called racial differences in IQ scores are more a consequence of disparities in socioeconomic status and the quality of education than of any genetic differences between ethnic groups. Efforts to improve educational quality and opportunity can increase the economic benefits associated with increased educational achievement."

"Unfortunately, many people find it difficult to accept what current science tells us about the myth of race. It runs counter to what seem to be obvious racial distinctions, mostly in parts of the world where immigration history has juxtaposed people with discontinuous ancestral backgrounds in the same place. The racial categorizations that many of us have experienced throughout our lives have likewise inculcated a sense of racial division that is not easy to abandon. Regardless of what the science shows, the perception of race and the associated racial discrimination are unlikely to disappear soon. Furthermore, a scientific understanding of human evolutionary history challenges commonly-held religious beliefs that are based on literal interpretations of biblical history."

"A significant minority of people fully reject human evolution, opting instead for the belief that humans were specially created with no prior evolutionary ancestry less than ten thousand years ago. Such beliefs are often infused with a non-scientific perception of different races and how the supposedly originated. And, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence and changing social norms, a relatively large proportion of people still cling to past traditions of white supremacy and racism."

"To understand who we are as a species, and why we vary as we do, we must examine our genetic diversity in the context of a common African origin, followed by intra- and intercontinental diasporas that transpired over a period of tens of thousands of years, culminating in an era of major migrations that reshuffled the worldwide human genetic construction over the past several thousand years and is still underway. Last, we must recognize that today’s human population is far larger, more diverse, and more complex than it ever has been. We are all related, more than seven billion of us, recent cousins to one another, and, ultimately, everyone is African."

"There has been little morphological evidence offered since Darwin in support of the relatedness of humans and one or both of the African apes, but that, when the relationships among the extant humanoids are investigated cladistically in an evaluation of more than 200 morphological features, there are well over twice as many morphological synapomorphies in support of uniting humans with the orang-utan as with the African ape clad and very few in support of uniting the chimpanzee more closely with humans than with the gorilla."

"A "new" systematics will be forthcoming only when the urge to be "right" takes a back seat to the possibility that one is wrong."

"Although it may be extremely reasonable (especially from our present vantage point) to conclude that some part of human evolution, if not aspects of the diversification of hominoids in general, is indeed preserved in the fossil record of Africa, this does not in and of itself lead inexorably to the conclusion that humans and African apes are closely related."

"It is frustrating to know, on the one hand, that every living thing on earth will have had a single, unique history—whether it be the life of an individual, of a civilization, of a species, of a diverse evolutionary group—and, on the other, to be constantly in the position of trying to discover it."

"I hope to... provide insights into the interpretation of "evidence" and the application of the "scientific method" so that you... will be more attuned to what scientists are saying, and why they may be saying it, and realize that the problems and issues that they are addressing are matters we can all think about critically."

"Science, especially evolutionary sciences, can only proceed from learning about theories of hypotheses that do not stand the test of time."

"There are always alternative interpretations of the same data. It is often the case, however, that the alternatives that are rejected are treated as if they don't exist. But they do. And we should be aware not only of their existence and potential viability, but of the possibility that the hypotheses that we might embrace so strongly today may very well be the rejects of tomorrow."

"The upper and lower ends of a humerus are like the brim and base of an urn. The shaft of the bone is like the belly of the urn. Fragments, even minute ones, of the detailed parts of a bone are like the indicator sherds of a broken urn. Fragments, even large ones, of the shaft of a bone are like the body sherds of a broken urn. Analyzing bones, after all, is very much like analyzing pottery."

"Petrie found that certain types of pottery were characteristic of a particular phase of the Bronze Age, whereas other styles were found only a phase of the Iron Age, or only during the Hellenistic or Greek periods."

"Some... resistance also came from the belief that preserved historical writings could provide all anyone needed to know about the habits of past civilizations. ...According to the archeologists, this site was supposed to have had an uninterrupted sequence of Israelite occupation... These archeologists "knew" that there had been a continual occupation of people practicing full-blown Jewish orthodoxy based on their interpretation of the preserved written records. ...But, to the extreme surprise of the dig's staff... one-third of the bones from the floor of the synagogue were pig. Anathema! ...directly beneath the floor of this synagogue... the first piece of bone I picked up was from the skull of a young human. Again, anathema! How could orthodox Jews build anything, much less a synagogue, over a human burial area? ...no reports on the site including my analyses have ever seen the light of day."

"The Bodo skull and the Kaprina and Shanidar Neandertal skeletons raise the possibility that two distinct, non-spaiens species of Homo had had rituals and cultural practices that we have assumed are only within the capacity of members of our own species."

"The processes of bone preservation are such that the farther back in time we go, the less there is."

"The smaller the mammal, the more it is confined to smaller geographic areas. A small mammal is also more susceptible to subtle changes in climate and environment. ...On average, the absence or presence of smaller species provides more precise clues to past conditions in an area than does the information gained from study of the bone assemblages of the larger animals."

"The corpses of water-dwelling animals often sink to the bottom and become covered with sediment. The sediment tends to protect the dead body and even at times retain an impression of its shape and external anatomical details. This environment then provides the means by which the bones of the skeleton are mineralized. ...most land animals die and fall to the ground, without any chance of a freak flood casting them into an environment more favorable to fossilization."

"Becoming a rock does not ensure safety. ...The blasting of windblown sands, the pummeling of waves, the corrosive secretions of mosses and lichens, and even the steady rhythm of a stream can, in time, reduce a seemingly indestructible boulder to a grain of sand."

"From a succession of historians we learn of a particularly gruesome component of Carthaginian daily life: the routine and ritualized sacrificing of not just animals—animal sacrifice was a common religious activity of all Mediterranean cultures—but of infants and children. ...Greek and Roman historians were unanimous in their abhorrence of the Carthaginian practice..."

"Greeks and Romans alike engaged openly in a variety of sanctioned atrocities, including adult human sacrifice. ...according to ...Cicero, human sacrifice was not restricted to the western Phoenicians but was widely accepted among Mediterranean societies as a pious act that would please the gods."

"The Phoenicians were the Canaanites. Thus Phoenicia... was invaded by the Israelites, who eventually pushed the Phoenicians to the coastal fringe. Subsequently, the Israelites borrowed various cultural elements from the Phoenicians, including the first alphabet. Some groups of Israelites even adopted the god Ba'al and, presumably, the practice of child sacrifice."

"If Walter Garstang's suggestion is correct, and chordates did arise from a tunicate-like form by retaining the chordate features of their larval stage of development into adulthood, then the first chordates must have been affected by a regulatory mutation that kept the Manx gene activated for a longer period of time."

"The sudden appearance of novelty is not, as Otto Schindewolf emphasized, an unusual aspect of the fossil record."

"The observation of reduction in complexity in many groups or organisms after a structure has emerged in a full-blown state makes sense in terms of homeobox genes."

"A micromutation can produce what Goldschmidt would have described as macromutation leading to macroevolution. Since mutations in homeobox genes are inherited in the same way that earlier fruit-fly population geneticists understood the inheritance of the alleles for wing length or bristle number, we can appreciate that evolutionarily significant novelty—which, in turn, could result in the emergence of a new species—can be passed on from parent to child as easily and simply as eye color."

"As was demonstrated as long ago as the 1930s by the German experimental geneticist Hans Grüneberg, neither structural reduction or loss, nor structural addition, is a completely gradual process. Instead, the loss or gain of a structure is developmentally constrained to be more step-wise, or saltational."

"The often heated and sometimes nasty debates that have taken place between gradualists and punctuationists, or between micromutationists and macromutationists, have been generated by the perception that there is only one evolutionary question, for which... there can be only one correct answer. ...But if we take a different approach, and assume that both sides of a typical evolutionary debate have something valid to offer, then the theoretical and methodological disagreements between different schools of thought may just be a matter of having the right answer to a different question."

"More than one hundred years ago, William Bateson suggested that studying the regulation and timing of development was the key to understanding evolutionary change. He was right."

"He and John Grehan are the only two scientists on the whole planet who subscribe to this red-ape hypothesis. ...I think he's completely wrong on this hypothesis of his, but I have his books on my shelf."

"Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet been published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as described earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite."

"People often think that Europeans are homogeneous group that arrived in a simple way there maybe 40 or 50 thousand years ago maybe based on the archaeology and just kind of sat there until they became the Europeans they are today, but that's probably not true: the Europeans today are a replacement population who came in much more recently and replaced the people who were there originally 40 thousand years ago."

"The mixture of highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in our history."

"About ten thousand years ago there were at least four major populations in West Eurasia — the farmers of the Fertile Crescent, the farmers of Iran, the hunter-gatherers of central and western Europe, and the hunter-gatherers of eastern Europe. All these populations differed from one another as much as Europeans differ from East Asians today. Scholars interested in trying to create ancestry-based racial classifications, had they lived ten thousand years ago, would have categorized these groups as "races," even though none of these groups survives in unmixed form today."

"Ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science."

"“Whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today."

"We warn that models in population genetics should be treated with caution. Although they provide an important framework for testing historical hypotheses, they are oversimplifications. For example, the true ancestral populations of India were probably not homogeneous as we assume in our model, but instead were probably formed by clusters of related groups that mixed at different times. (Reich et al. 2009: 492)"

"The circularity of the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI) vs ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI) concept is another case in point. Reich (2018) admits that he thought it up overnight simply to avert serious differences with his Indian collaborators. No precise definition was ever given to these two supposedly highly distinct groups; they were simply stated to be ‘genetically divergent’ (Reich et al. 2009) and were used in several subsequent studies as though they had been rigorously established. Elsewhere (Danino 2014), I showed that the populations sampled were very seriously restricted, since 18 states of India had either no representation or only one group represented in the 2009 study. Despite such a skewed distribution, Reich et al. exuded confidence in the newly coined terms and found it ‘tempting to assume that the population ancestral to ANI and CEU [Europeans] spoke ‘‘Proto-Indo-European’’ … ’ (Reich et al. 2009, p. 492) – a gratuitous association built, again, on circularity."

"Complexity science is a project aimed at unification, trying to establish principles that are common to all adaptive systems."

"I do view the march of technology as kind of inevitable. But I would like to accompany it with reason. And one form of reasoning that’s useful in these debates is to find precedence."

"I think the history of humanity is the history of our co-evolution with devices and artifacts that make our lives easier. And I think it's now a question from moral philosophy — not for science — to decide how we use them and what it would mean to be enslaved by them, whether we do so willingly or reluctantly and genuinely."

"When two sympatric, closely related species appear to have very similar needs, we may ask whether mechanisms exist that enable them to avoid direct competition. Implicit in this questions the presumption that two species with identical requirements cannot coexist (Gause 1934)."

"The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a creature of superlatives. Growing to 1500 pounds (700 kilos), traveling on transoceanic migrations, and reputedly capable of swimming 50 miles (90 km) per hour, it is one of the largest, most wide-ranging, and fastest of animals. To anyone who has seen this saber-finned giant explode through the surface of the sea, it is among the most magnificent."

"Bottom trawls—large bag-shaped nets towed over the sea floor—account for more of the world's catch of fish, shrimp, squid, and other marine animals than any other fishing method. But trawling also disturbs the sea floor more than any other human activity, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world's fish population."

"Most of the oxygen we breathe is made by ocean plankton. And when animals left the seas in which life arose, they took seawater with them, in their bodies — an internal environment crucial for cellular survival. We are, in a sense, soft vessels of seawater."

"A couple of years ago I was participating as a writing coach in a "sea-mester," sailing 1,000 miles from Hawaii to , while students from Stanford University received lectures and closely supervised instruction and conducted independent projects on high-tech oceanography. These were smart kids, and the professors were superb. Five hundred miles from land, we got into a discussion on whether the ocean is a "wilderness." The consensus: Obviously it is; there was no sign of humanity, not another boat in sight. Everyone savored the thought: wilderness! But, I reminded everyone, we haven't caught a single or seen a or a . Wilderness? I don't think so. If the were covered with water, you wouldn't see that the buffalo were gone, either. There is no ocean wilderness. The whole ocean feels our effects, through fishing, pollution, dying s, , immortal plastics, oxygen-asphyxiated s, , and ."

"From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we're gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems. And that is truly an addiction in the real sense of the word, an addiction by which people destroy their own bodies to continue to have a supply of something that is killing them."

"... I haven’t wanted to write the same book over and over again, so I’ve gone back to what was really my earliest interest, which is what other animals do and why do they do it. My upcoming book, “Alfie and Me,” is also much more about the human relationship with the rest of life on Earth, why it’s the way it is for us now, and how it was in other cultures, in other times. And it’s really about what kind of relationship with the world we can have when we blur the usual boundary between us and other species. The narrative story is wrapped around a little baby that was near death that somebody found on their lawn and was brought to us, and whom we raised. She decided to stay around our property and to get a wild mate, and to raise young in a that I put up on the outside wall of my studio."

"Doing your own gardening makes you much more aware of food cycles, what it takes to grow it, and what the range of food quality is."

"When it comes to getting away, big pits are a handicap. A quarter-pound seed isn't going to be blown about by anything less than a hurricane, and in water an avocado pit sinks."

"All that we can say, looking at the avocado pit, is that whatever swallowed it must have been big. As big as those fossil skeletons staring out at us from behind the dusty glass of museum cases."

"Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex — a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be. I suppose that when a person feels right in the sex they were born into, they are never forced to locate or question their subconscious sex, to differentiate it from their physical sex. In other words, their subconscious sex exists, but it is hidden from their view. They have a blind spot. (5 - Blind Spots: On Subconscious Sex and Gender Entitlement)"

"There are numerous forms of marginalization that exist in our society: , classism, sexism, , heterosexism, and so on. If you happen to be on the wrong side of any of these hierarchies, you will face many inequities and injustices. ... Some people are single-issue activists that are only concerned about a single form of marginalization, usually one that impacts them personally. Single-issue perspectives create a distorted view of the world, and lead activists to propose solutions that will help some people while hurting others and leaving countless more behind. ... In contrast, others of us take a more intersectional approach, recognizing that all forms of marginalization intersect with and exacerbate one another, and that we must challenge all of them simultaneously."

"People usually gravitate toward single-issue activism because they are unconcerned about forms of marginalization that do not personally impact them."

"The “principal contradiction” refers to the idea that there is some original or primary form of oppression that gives rise to all the others. ... Of course, there is really only one purpose for making such a claim: to persuade others to join you in your single-issue activist campaign, under the pretense that once your pet oppression is eliminated, all other forms of marginalization will subsequently fall by the wayside too. But the thing is, there is simply no evidence for a principal contradiction. ... There is no primary contradiction, just lots of different hierarchies that people may or may not endorse."

"Here is how I describe the concept of privilege to skeptics: Do you believe that marginalized/minority groups face discrimination and are as a result? If the answer is yes, then another equally valid way of describing the same situation is to say that dominant/majority groups are relatively advantaged in comparison. “Privilege” simply refers to those advantages. One of the reasons why activists frame such matters in terms of privilege is to illustrate how *all of us* are impacted by unjust hierarchies and systems, even if it is not always apparent to us."

"Once a person acknowledges that they possess some form of privilege, they are more likely to accept the reality that they are not in any way objective about the form of marginalization in question"

"I mentioned at the outset that I dislike the term "identity politics." This is because the phrase seems to suggest that our identities (rather than the marginalization we face) is the most salient feature of our activism. Indeed, this is probably why those who oppose IP-umbrella activism seem so fond of calling it “identity politics” in the first place. [...] In contrast, within IP circles, the term is often reserved for a specific brand of single-issue activism that completely precludes perspectives from those who do not share the identity in question."

"Accusations that IP is inherently “narcissistic” and “divisive” have become quite prevalent among EC-centric leftists lately. [...] In addition to disregarding all forms of non-EC marginalization, accusations that IP activism is inherently “narcissistic” or "divisive" severely confuse cause and effect. After all, I’m not the one who is “obsessed” with my identity. [...] It’s the people who harbor anti-trans attitudes who are obsessed with my identity, not the other way around! While I would absolutely love to live in a world where my trans identity was not especially notable or worth calling attention to, these people insist on making an issue out of it. Furthermore, by making a distinction between transgender people (who they single out for discrimination) and non-transgender people (whose identities and experiences they respect), it is they (not us) who are the ones being divisive. Once we acknowledge this causality, it becomes clear that IP is not an expression of navel-gazing or narcissism, but rather a form of organized resistance against those who are actively trying to delegitimize and disenfranchise us."

"I would love to live in a world where the word “transgender” serves the same simple purpose — a mere sharing of information about my life experiences — but unfortunately, it doesn’t. On top of being a descriptor, the word "transgender" is also politically loaded. But that is not my, nor other trans people’s, fault. As discussed in the last section, there’s a long history of people hating, ostracizing, and criminalizing us, and much of this history took place before words like "transgender," "transphobia," and analogous terms even existed. In fact, those terms were created in response to that marginalization, not the other way around. And even if I were to relinquish my trans identity, those people would still exist and continue to discriminate against me for supposedly being a sinner, or freak, or deviant, or for being delusional, or whatever other rationales they might concoct in order to justify their bigotry."

"Women who insist that trans women are not women often object to being called “cis women” under the false assumption that it somehow undermines their femaleness — this is not at all the purpose of this language. The sole purpose of cis terminology is to name the unmarked majority (similar to how one might refer to white women, or heterosexual women, or able-bodied women, etc.). In other words, referring to someone as “cisgender” simply means that they have not had a transgender experience."

"Trans women differ greatly from one another. Perhaps the only thing that we share in common is a self-understanding that there was something wrong with our being assigned a male sex at birth and/or that we should be female instead. While some cisgender people refuse to take our experiences seriously, the fact of the matter is that transgender people can be found in virtually every culture and throughout history; current estimates suggest that we make up 0.2 – 0.3% of the population [or possibly more]. [...] In other words, we simply exist."

"Like women more generally, many trans women are feminists. Feminism and transgender activism are not in any way incompatible or mutually exclusive. As feminists who acknowledge intersectionality, we believe that we should be fighting to end all forms of sexism and marginalization — this includes both traditional sexism and transphobia. Forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism."

"Claims that trans women are not women often rely on essentialist (and therefore incorrect) assumptions about biology. For instance, people might argue that trans women are not “genetically female,” despite the fact that we cannot readily ascertain anybody’s sex chromosomes. Indeed, most people have never even had their sex chromosomes examined, and those that do are sometimes surprised by the results. Other common appeals to biology center on reproduction — e.g., stating that trans women have not experienced menstruation, or cannot become pregnant. This ignores the fact that some cisgender women never menstruate and/or are unable to become pregnant. Claims about genitals are similarly problematic: Women’s genitals vary greatly, and as with chromosomes and reproductive capabilities, we cannot readily see other people’s genitals in everyday encounters. If you and I were to meet, should I refuse to recognize or refer to you as a woman unless you show me your genitals? And frankly, what could possibly be more sexist than reducing a woman to what’s between her legs? Isn’t that precisely what sexist men have been doing to women for centuries on end?"

"While gender socialization is quite real, all of us are capable of overcoming or transcending the socialization that we experienced as children. And gender socialization doesn’t simply stop when one reaches adulthood: All of us are constantly facing gender-related social pressures, expectations, and obstacles throughout our lives. If you believe that these statements are true for cis women, then they also must be true for trans women."

"Trans women do not transition out of a desire to be feminine; we transition out of a self-understanding that we are or should be female (commonly referred to as gender identity)."

"Trans women who are conventionally feminine are not in any way asserting or insinuating that all women should be conventionally feminine, or that femininity is all there is to being a woman. Like cis women, trans women dress the way we do in order to express ourselves, not to critique or caricature other women."

"As a trans woman, I will be the first to admit that I cannot possibly know what any other woman experiences or feels on the inside. But the thing is, the trans-women-aren’t-women crowd cannot possibly know what any other woman experiences or feels either! Every woman is different. We share some overlapping experiences, but we also differ in every possible way. Every trans woman I know acknowledges this diversity. In contrast, it’s the cis women who attempt to exclude us who seem to have a singular superficial stereotypical notion of what constitutes a woman, or of what women experience."

"Trans women are women. We may not be “exactly like” cis women, but then again, cis women are not all “exactly like” one another either. But what we do share is that we all identify and move through the world as women. And because of this, we all regularly face sexism. That is what we should be focusing on and working together to challenge. And as I said at the outset, forcing trans women into a separate group that is distinct from cis women does not in any way help achieve feminism’s central goal of ending sexism. In fact, it only serves to undermine our collective cause."

"People tend to harbor essentialist beliefs about sex — that is, they presume that each sex category has an underlying "essence" that makes them what they are. This is what leads people to assume that trans women remain "biologically male" despite the fact that many of our sex characteristics are now female. However, there is no “essence” underlying sex; it is simply a collection of sexually dimorphic traits. Some people will presume that sex chromosomes must be this "essence," even though we cannot readily see them, plus there are non-XX or XY variants. Others presume that genitals are this "essence" (probably because they are used to determine our birth-assigned and legal sex), although they can vary too, and may eventually change (e.g., if one undergoes sex reassignment surgery). In day-to-day life, we primarily rely on secondary sex characteristics to determine (or more precisely, presume) what sex a person is — and of course, these traits may change via a simple hormone prescription. Like I said, there is no mystical “essence” underlying sex."

"Sex is a collection of traits that, while generally dimorphic, can vary greatly in the population, and some can change over time. While the terms "male" and "female" have some utility, we should not view them as strictly dichotomous or mutually exclusive. Rather, “female” and “male” are best thought of as umbrella terms that describe groupings of people (or animals) who generally share many of the same traits, albeit with considerable variability and some exceptions."

"The most infuriating assertion regularly made by the "trans women are biologically male" camp is that trans people are somehow "denying" or "erasing" biological sex differences, and that this hurts cisgender women/"[w:Female|biological females]].” This is patently untrue. I can assure you that trans people are highly aware of biological sex differences — the fact that many of us physically transition demonstrates that we acknowledge that sexually dimorphic traits exist and may be important to some people! I would reframe things this way: Transgender people often have a more complicated relationship with our sex-related traits (as they may be discordant with our identified and lived genders), and thus the language that we use to describe or discuss these traits may seem arcane, or nonsensical, or unnecessary to the average cisgender person. And because they are unfamiliar with this language (and/or flat-out antagonistic toward us), some cisgender people will subsequently misinterpret this language and differing perspective as some sort of "denial.""

"The freshwater fish fauna of Florida is one of the most interesting in the United States. It is a fauna developed in a region of recent geologic origin, low topographic relief, poor drainage, and unusual geographic configuration, and consequently exhibits certain very peculiar features. Some of the characteristic continental groups apparently have not had time to establish themselves in the peninsula since its elevation above the sea, while others have doubtless failed to find suitable conditions in its low and swamp-bordered water courses."

"Only a little while ago the oceans seemed unassailable—too big and stable to be hurt by man, too teeming with life to let him ever go hungry. But now we know better. Suddenly, even the myriad creatures of the sea are suffering from human intemperance. The offal of cities circles the world in global currents; beaches are strewn with the cast-off artifacts of men two thousand miles away."

"Sea turtles of all kinds are peculiarly prone to eat plastic scraps and other buoyant debris and to tangle themselved in lines and netting discarded by fishermen, and records of such mishaps have increased markedly in recent years."

"During his lifetime, Carr, the "Turtle Man," was recognized as the foremost authority on turtles. He helped dispel the myths and folklore about turtles. His extensive studies of the migrations and habits of turtles enabled him to locate the optimal areas for turtles to live and breed. His consistent efforts for the conservation of turtles have helped to increase their population throughout the world."

"Science, as traditionally defined, is fundamental to conservation biology but does no good if isolated from "softer" issues such as ethics, sociology, and political strategy. Indeed, there is nothing more dangerous than science in an ethical vacuum."

"... We cannot get big grants to do field work anymore. ... Will the next generation of conservation biologists be nothing but a bunch of computer nerds with no firsthand knowledge of natural history? ... The naturalists are dying off and have few heirs."

"Many university departments—especially the traditional resource disciplines such as fisheries, wildlife, range management, and forestry—are closely tied to industry or hook‐and‐bullet recreation and treat conservation biology with anxiety or disdain."

"Among the common changes in forests over the past two centuries are loss of old forests, simplification of forest structure, decreasing size of forest patches, increasing isolation of patches, disruption of natural fire regimes, and increased road building, all of which have had negative effects on native biodiversity."

"No thoughtful persons could stand beneath one of these immense trees, gaze up into its canopy, and help but think that here is a remarkable organism—so much more than all the board-feet of lumber that men might cleave from it."

"Nature no longer entertains us when conserving it becomes inconvenient."

"The main lesson that emerges from this volume is that sea level rise, combined with human population growth, urban development in coastal areas, and landscape fragmentation, poses an enormous threat to human and natural well-being in Florida. How Floridians respond to sea level rise will offer lessons, for better or worse, for other low-lying regions worldwide."

"Endless fascination with nature—nothing more and nothing less—is the key to enlisting people in the fight to save biodiversity."

"A few human generations ago, grasslands were abundant across much of the South; today there are rare. Driving through the region today, one mostly sees agricultural fields, pine plantations, dense and mostly young hardwood forests and swamps, and, increasingly, urban sprawl."

"The general biological ignorance bodes ill for democratic decisions on environmental issues."

"The classification of biodiversity is the job of taxonomists who, born as packrats and inspired by a compulsion to explore and collect the world's biological riches, will risk life and limb to solve the great puzzles of biogeography, ethnobotany, and evolution."

"Current evidence suggests that teosinte was first tended for its green ears and sugary pith by hunter-gatherers as an occasional rainy-season food in small “garden” populations away from its homeland, and not for its abundant grain-containing, hard fruitcases, which easily mass-collected but useless as food, are as yet unknown from the archeological record. A rare grain-liberating teosinte mutation (probably expressed in only one “founder” plant, a mazoid “Eve”), which exposed the encased grain for easy harvest, was soon recognized as useful, collected and planted (or self-planted). Thus maize was started on its way to a unique horticultural domestication that is not comparable to that of the temperate Old World mass-selected agricultural grains."

"As a plant explorer, Iltis led expeditions to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador. His expertise focused on the corn and caper families, but he collected broadly. For example, he discovered two of the 13 species in the tomato genus, including one that proved to have a trait sought in the canning industry."

"Heteroecy appears to be a consequence of the seasonal polymorphism of aphids, which causes some morphs (the fundatrices) to be more evolutionarily constrained than others (the summer females) in their abilities to acquire hosts. Some aphid lineages have escaped this constraint by replacing the ancestral fundatrix morph and remaining all year on former secondary hosts, thus becoming secondarily autoecious. Most of the large and species-rich groups of Aphidinae on herbaceous angiosperms probably are derived from ancestors showing such life-cycle reduction."

"Biogeographical and paleobotanical evidence suggests that the aphid subtribe Melaphidina has been associated with its sumac host plant since the early Eocene when these plants were continuously distributed across the Bering land bridge. Transfer experiments indicate that the American species, Melaphis rhois, shows an unusual complex life cycle, similar to that known in Chinese melaphidines, with some generations feeding on mosses as alternate host plants. As with the association with sumac, this complex life cycle may have been established in the melaphidine lineage before the southward retreat of sumac from Alaska 48 million years ago. This example suggests that the interactions and life histories shown by modern populations may be determined, in large part, by evolutionary commitments made in the distant past."

"The aphid Pemphigus betae typically shows a complex life cycle, with annual alternation between cottonwood trees, where it forms leaf galls, and herbaceous plants, where it lives on roots. Distinct phenotypes are associated with each phase. In a population in Utah, aphid clones vary in their tendencies to undergo the cottonwood phase of the life cycle, with certain clones rarely producing the winged migrants that initiate the cottonwood phase."

"Life cycles that incorporate discrete, morphologically distnct phases predominate among animals."

"Among the many early revelations from molecular phylogenetic studies of bacteria (Woese, 1987) was the recognition that the mycoplasmas represented an evolutionarily derived condition rather than a primitive one, as once believed. Now that phylogenetic relationships and genome sizes are determined for a broader array of organisms, it is clear that the mycoplasmas are just one example of genome shrinkage that has occurred in a variety of obligately host-associated bacteria. Other prominent examples are Rickettsia and related pathogens within the α-proteobacteria; insect symbionts within the γ-proteobacteria, as exemplified by Buchnera aphidicola in aphids; the chlamydiae; and the parasitic spirochetes, such as Borrelia burgdorferi (the agent of Lyme disease)."

"Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms are key players. The primary reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology, is that DNA technology and genomics give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute to the functioning of hosts and biological communities."

"Buchnera only have 600 genes, compared to about 4,000 or 5,000 for E. coli ... This is a recurring pattern in the genomes of both bacterial symbionts and pathogens, but why do they get so small? ... while part of the reduction is due to adaptation, a lot of it just reflects genetic drift ... It's just a consequence of long-term evolution in a restricted environment with small population sizes."

"The genomes of long-term obligate symbionts often undergo irreversible gene loss and deterioration even as hosts evolve dependence on them. In some cases, animal genomes may have acquired genes from symbionts, mirroring the gene uptake from mitochondrial and plastid genomes. Multiple symbionts often coexist in the same host, resulting in coadaptation among several phylogenetically distant genomes."

"The guts of honey bee workers contain a distinctive community of bacterial species. They are microaerophilic or anaerobic, and were not clearly deliniated by earlier studies relying on laboratory culture of isolates under atmospheric oxygen levels. Recently, a more complete picture of the potential metabolism and functions of these bacteria have been possible, using genomic approaches based on metagenomic samples, as well as cultured isolates. Of these, most are host-restricted and are generally absent outside adult guts."

"The phenomenon of genetic recombination provides a powerful tool for separating mutations and discerning their positions along a chromosome. When it comes to very closely neighboring mutations, a difficulty arises, since the closer two mutations lie to one another, the smaller the probability that recombination between them will occur. Therefore, failure to observe recombinant types among a finite number of progeny ordinarily does not justify the conclusion that the two mutations are inseparable but can only place an upper limit on the linkage distance between them. A high degree of resolution requires the examination of very may progeny. This can best be achieved if there is available a selective feature for the detection of small proportions of recombination."

"Complex as it is, much of the vast network of cellular functions has been successfully dissected, on a microscopic scale, by the use of mutants in which one element is altered at a time. A similar approach may be fruitful in tackling the complex structures and events underlying behavior, using behavioral mutations to indicate modifications of the nervous system. Drosophila offers the same advantages to such a study as it did to classical genetics, namely, large numbers and short generation time, to which now may be added an enormous store of accumulated knowledge concerning the organism. Containing about 105 neurons, the fly's nervous system is roughly halfway, on a logarithmic scale, between a single neuron and the human brain, and the fly is possessed of a rich repertoire of behavior."

"The problems that Benzer and his students are solving are problems that scientists and philosophers from the beginning of recorded history have been unable to solve and also unable to ignore."

"Key aspects of the bacteriophage work illustrate central features of Seymour's ability to design scientific investigations; these features played out again and again in his scientific career, to great success. One of these is the “simple assay.” Seymour was an enthusiast of developing and using simple assays to approach any biological question of interest. Why use a complicated, time-consuming assay if a simple one would address the question equally well? Using a simpler assay would give more time and opportunity to delve in greater depth into the specific scientific question, as well as allow more time and opportunity to address additional questions of great interest."

"It might have had something to do with the fact that the stars shone so brightly in rural Maine."

"Here we are up in Caribou, which is my home as well as yours, but when you think about your home, you usually think about your house, your neighborhood, and your family, and when you look at this fragile blue ball from outer space, that’s home too. It’s everybody’s home."

"Mars has always captured the human imagination for decades and decades, it’s always been the planet that everyone’s looking toward. Knowing it’s out there, it’s what drives everything that we do."

"There’s no one path to becoming an astronaut. I think that’s one of the great things about the job these days. You know, originally, all of the astronauts were white male military test pilots. And now the program is much more diverse."

"If chromosomes are broken by various means, the broken ends appear to be adhesive and tend to fuse with one another 2-by-2. This has been abundantly illustrated in the studies of chromosomal aberrations induced by X-ray treatment. It also occurs after mechanical rupture of ring-shaped chromosomes during somatic mitoses in maize and is assumed to occur during the normal process of crossing-over."

"When, through radiation or other causes, chromosomes are broken within a single nucleus, 2-by-2 fusions may occur between the broken ends. These fusions may lead to rearrangements of parts of the chromatin complement, giving rise to various chromosomal aberrations which are detected as reciprocal translocations, inversions, deficiencies, etc. Since, in the well-investigated cases, the breakages occurred within a single nucleus, the conditions that lead to fusions of broken ends could not easily be ascertained."

"An experiment conducted in the mid-nineteen forties prepared me to expect unusual responses of a genome to challenges for which the genome is unprepared to meet in an orderly, programmed manner. In most known instances of this kind, the types of response were not predictable in advance of initial observations of them. It was necessary to subject the genome repeatedly to the same challenge in order to observe and appreciate the nature of the changes it induces. Familiar examples of this are the production of mutation by X-rays and by some mutagenic agents. In contrast to such “shocks” for which the genome is unprepared, are those a genome must face repeatedly, and for which it is prepared to respond in a programmed manner. Examples are the “heat shock” responses in eukaryotic organisms, and the “SOS” responses in bacteria. Each of these initiates a highly programmed sequence of events within the cell that serves to cushion the effects of the shock. Some sensing mechanism must be present in these instances to alert the cell to imminent danger, and to set in motion the orderly sequence of events that will mitigate this danger. The responses of genomes to unanticipated challenges are not so precisely programmed. Nevertheless, these are sensed, and the genome responds in a descernible but initially unforeseen manner."

"In 1950, Barbara McClintock published a Classic PNAS article, “The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize,” which summarized the evidence leading to her discovery of transposition. The article described a number of genome alterations revealed through her studies of the Dissociation locus, the first mobile genetic element she identified. McClintock described the suite of nuclear events, including transposon activation and various chromosome aberrations and rearrangements, that unfolded in the wake of genetic crosses that brought together two broken chromosomes 9. McClintock left future generations with the challenge of understanding how genomes respond to genetic and environmental stresses by mounting adaptive responses that frequently include genome restructuring."

"In the year of her election to the National Academy, she began the series of experiments that led her to transposition—work that many now see as the most important of her career. At the time, only she thought so. To most, her conclusions seemed too radical."

"When Barbara McClintock was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants, the most striking thing about her was that she made her discoveries by listening to what the corn spoke to her, by respecting the life of the corn and "letting it McClintock says she learned "the stories" of the plants. She "heard them. She watched the daily green journeys of growth from carth toward sky and sun. She knew her plants in the way a healer or mystic would have known them, from the inside, the inner voices of corn and woman speaking to one another. As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us, and it is important to me that McClintock listened to the voices of corn. It is important to the continuance of life that she told the truth of her method and that it reminded us all of where our strength, our knowing, and our sustenance come from. It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective."

"Age-related sensory changes can be traced to degeneration in some of the cells and cell products that compose the sense organ itself."

"Natural selection favors animals that are most likely to become reproductively successful by developing better survival strategies and greater reserve capacity in vital systems to better escape predation, disease, accidents, and environmental extremes. Natural selection diminishes after reproductive success because the species will not benefit from members favored for greater longevity. The level of physiological reserve remaining after reproductive maturity determines longevity and evolves incidental to the selection process that acts on earlier developmental events. Physiological reserve does not renew at the same rate that it incurs losses because molecular disorder increases at a rate greater than the capacity for repair. These are age changes, and they increase vulnerability to predation, accidents, or disease."

"Since the first cell culture was set at the beginning of the twentieth century it was believed that all cultured cells, if provided with the proper conditions, would replicate indefinitely. Sixty years later we overthrew this dogma by finding that normal cells have a finite capacity to replicate and that only abnormal or cancer cell populations can replicate indefinitely. We interpreted these findings to bear on our understanding of the aging process. If, as had been previously thought, normal cells can replicate indefinitely, then age changes could not have an intracellular origin. Our findings demonstrated that, on the contrary, age changes do have an intracellular origin. The hundreds of changes that were subsequently found to precede the loss of replicative capacity have been interpreted to be age changes and the finitude of replication to be an expression of longevity determination. Subsequent findings by others have determined the molecular mechanism that governs the finitude of normal cell replicative capacity and how immortal cancer cells escape this inevitability."

"Geron's board was a Who's Who of telomere research, with a little biological stardust thrown in. It included Carol Greider (who ran a lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory now), Woody Wright and Jerry Shay, Michael West's former mentors at the University of Texas; James Watson, the famed codiscoverer of the double helix; and, for historical, scientific, and even sentimental reasons, Leonard Hayflick."

"Merino sheep always flock while Highland sheep spread. The reason is that in Spain the summer feeding and winter feeding of the sheep were widely separated, and the shepherd had to march them many miles along the road and through the villages. If they did not flock, they would soon be lost in their seasonal journey. On the other hand, the Scottish shepherd never moves his Highland sheep large distances and wishes them to spread out as much as possible over the hills so that no one area is overgrazed, and both of these characteristics have been achieved by selective breeding."

"First, there was a selection for an increase in size by becoming multicellular, and once achieved there was a selection for better integration, a better coordination of the adhering cells to compete effectively for energy and for a way to reproduce successfully. Then, which each successive step of size increase, propelled always by the fact the uppermost size niche is never filled, there has been a further selection pressure for integration and coordination, often by new and innovative devices to accommodate the newly created larger organism."

"RULE 1 Strength varies with size."

"RULE 2 Surfaces that permit diffusion of oxygen, of food, of heat in and out of the body, vary with size."

"RULE 3 The division of labor (complexity) varies with size."

"RULE 4 The rate of various living processes varies with size, such as metabolism, generation time, longevity, and the speed of locomotion."

"RULE 5 The abundance of organisms in nature varies with their size."

"The seeds of a few kinds of weeds can be carried long distances by natural means; for instance, dandelion seeds are wind-transported, cockleburs and stickseeds are carried by the hair of animals. However, the seeds of most weeds are spread by human agencies, most commonly in mixtures with agricultural seed."

"Legumes are vital because they provide fixed nitrogen for agricultural soils (the recent substitution of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers certainly being a temporary expedient), and because they furnish most of the protein for human food in high-population parts of the world. Man's dependence on grasses and legumes has been coeval."

"2007: permanent blackouts in cities starting in 2012 due to ;"

"2012: "likely" extinction of humanity by 2030 due to climate-change, and mass die-off by 2020 "for those living in the interior of a large continent""

"2018: based on "projections" of climate-change and species loss, "Specifically, I predict that there will be no humans on Earth by 2026"."

"Other scientists are specialists. They focus on a narrow topic. They do not consider the entire Earth system in their work..."

"Climate change and its impacts are here. Expect superstorms, extreme heat, high humidity, and increased spread of deadly diseases. Plants and non-human animals will die in ever-larger numbers. Civilisation will fail, leading to greatly exacerbated impacts."

"I'm a teacher. I relay evidence. I cite science. I'm not relying on a belief system."

"I've been accused of many things, extremist included. I'm merely connecting a few dots based on the work of other scientists. In a culture characterised by willful ignorance and the inability to think critically, these accusations are to be expected."

"Accrding the the 6-month ensemble forecast created by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and ice-free Arctic Ocean will not occur this year. ...[T]his was the same group of professors who incorrectly projected an ice-free Arctic Ocean to occur in 2016, plus or minus 3 years. So they are being very conservative."

"On September 17 of this year we bottom out at... about 4.7 million km2 of ice floating on the Arctic ocean... [T]he forecast has been below the actual data... So this is great news and... I recommend that you track it... because it will give you a good idea [of] when an ice-free Arctic Ocean will occur, and therefore when we are likely to lose habitat for most, if not all species on Earth."

"Henry Gee is a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and senior editor at Nature, and he concluded on November 30, 2021 in a paper in Scientific American... in the final line, "If we are going to write about human extinction, we'd better start writing now" and the title... is "Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct." That's very inconvenient!"

"The aerosol masking effect results from industrial activity, as does planetary warming, so this is an interesting Catch-22. Planetary warming results from es that trap heat, So once the radiation gets through the atmosphere it can warm the soil, and the buildings, and thus the effect, and the planet in general... [G]reenhouse gases trap that heat so that about 30% of it held in the atmosphere... Without the greenhouse effect we wouldn't have life on earth, but... we are well beyond the point at which we can stop... the negative consequences. [Overhead: Tiny particles known as aerosols reflect incoming sunlight back into space before the radiation can warm the planet.] According to professor , which most of us know as being one of the founders of understanding climate change, the aerosols fall out of the atmosphere in about five days."

"The cooling resulting from contemporary aerosol masking in total right now is 55% globally, including a lot of that [Overhead: 133%] being on land. This is from... an open access peer reviewed journal... Nature Communications..."

"In many ways, McPherson is a photo-negative of the self-proclaimed “climate skeptics” who reject the conclusions of climate science. He may be advocating the opposite conclusion, but he argues his case in the same way. The skeptics often quote snippets of science that, on full examination, don’t actually support their claims, and this is McPherson’s modus operandi. The skeptics dismiss science they don’t like by saying that climate researchers lie to keep the grant money coming; McPherson dismisses inconvenient science by claiming that scientists are downplaying risks because they’re too cowardly to speak the truth and flout our corporate overlords. Both malign the IPCC as “political” and therefore not objective. And both will cite nearly any claim that supports their views, regardless of source— putting evidence-free opinions on par with scientific research."

"McPherson’s case basically boils down to arguing that feedbacks like large methane releases will soon kick in, causing a rapid spike in global warming that will lead to global extinctions. One of his primary pieces of supporting evidence is that Earth System Sensitivity – which describes how sensitive the climate is to the increased greenhouse effect over millennia – is higher than the shorter-term climate sensitivity."

"Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it (COVID-19) was an engineered virus."

"Whether or not a researcher of a certain notoriety deserves that the ‘support system’ [to] keep him going, there is a far more general problem: What props up biological research, at least in the vaunted US of A, involves a situation so deeply imbued with entitlement mentality that it has sunk into institutional corruption. A principal symptom of this state of affairs involves the following: People are hired after they have undergone long stints of training; and a potential hiree must present a large body of documented accomplishments. In my day you could get a faculty job with zero post-doc papers, as in the case of yours truly; but now the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full Professor from olden times. Notwithstanding these demands, and the associated high quality of a fledgling faculty-level type, the job starts with some “set-up” money for equipping the lab; but next to no means are provided to initiate that ‘research program’ and to sustain it during the years to come."

"US institutions (possibly also those in other countries) behave as though they… are entitled to research funding, which will magically materialize from elsewhere: “Get a grant, serf! If you can’t do it quickly, or have trouble for some years — or if your funding doesn’t get renewed, despite continuing productivity — forget it!” But what if there are so many applicants (as there are nowadays) that even a meritorious proposal gets the supplicant nowhere or causes a research group to grind prematurely to a halt? What if the situation is worsened when the government at hand is anti-science and otherwise squanders its resources on international adventurism?"

"Having said all this, I acknowledge that “I got mine” from the government over the course of many years. Thus, as I say so long,” one component of my last-gasp disquiet stems from pompously worrying about biologists who are starting out or are in mid-career."

"Every day there are new estimates coming out for the incubation period (of COVID-19)."

"In southern Florida the orchid flora is more or less confined to the peculiar hammock formations in the Everglades and in the pine woods. In these the species are found on the trees and on the ground, not infrequently around or withing the openings of lime-sinks. Each hammock is apt to have a distinctive flora, and when an orchid is common in one hammock, it may be rare in, or absent from, the next."

"The orchid flora of the Philippine Archipelago is closely allied to that of Celebs, Java, and the Malay Peninsula. There are no endemic genera. The number of endemic species, on the contrary, is very large, at least six-sevenths of the known ones having been found nowhere else. It is safe to say that approximately ninety per cent of the orchid flora is endemic."

"Professor Ames' lineage was one of power and wealth."

"He provides fascinating inside glimpses of Harvard biology in the age of the Olympians—East, Wheeler, Jeffrey, Sargent, Thaxter, Farlow, Weston, Bailey, and "Chinese" Wilson."

"Everything changes when we look at the evidence; what looks impossible actually happened."

"The order of fossils in the world’s rocks is powerful evidence of our connections to the rest of life."

"Just as Darwin’s theory predicted: at the right time, at the right place, we had found intermediates between two apparently different kinds of animals."

"Do the facts of our ancient history mean that humans are not special or unique among living creatures? Of course not. In fact, knowing something about the deep origins of humanity only adds to the remarkable fact of our existence: all of our extraordinary capabilities arose from basic components that evolved in ancient fish and other creatures. From common parts came a very unique construction. We are not separate from the rest of the living world; we are part of it down to our bones and, as we will see shortly, even our genes."

"Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth."

"Our fish ancestors had internal and external nostrils, too, and to nobody’s surprise these are the same fish that have armbones and other features in common with us."

"What do billions of years of history mean for our lives today? Answers to fundamental questions we face—about the inner workings of our organs and our place in nature—will come from understanding how our bodies and minds have emerged from parts common to other living creatures. I can imagine few things more beautiful or intellectually profound than finding the basis for our humanity, and remedies for many of the ills we suffer, nestled inside some of the most humble creatures that have ever lived on our planet."

"For thousands of years, mankind considered itself the pinnacle of life’s creation on a planet sitting in the center of the universe. Science changed that perception. Leavitt, Hubble, and others helped us see that we live near the margin of a vast galaxy, in a universe of galaxies, with our planet one of many worlds. Darwin and the biologists had their say too. Our entire species is but one little twig on an enormous tree of life filled with all life on earth. But each discovery that moves us from the center of creation to some obscure corner brings an entirely new relation between us, other species, and the entire universe."

"Humans are a timekeeping species, and much of our history can be traced to the ways we parse the moments of our lives."

"The thrill of the scientific hunt is to have an idea whose truth is hitched to predictions that take us to new places to explore, objects to discover, and data to analyze."

"During the past three decades, plant anatomists have established a number of lines of phylogenetic specializations in the structures of the stele."

"Harry's first publication (in 1951) was a short paper in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club entitled "Interesting weeds in New York City." It was during some of his collecting in the wilderness which is the Bronx that he was accosted by several policemen in a squad car, who demanded what he was doing with his odd vasculum over his shoulder. He explained he was a botanist and he was collecting plants. "You know all these weeds?", asked one the men. Upon being assured that he did, he was asked to join them in the car which drove some distance until they came to an open lot on which there was a flourishing crop. "What is it?" "Marihuana," was the reply. Whereupon one of the officers exploded, "Damn those kids, they told us they were tomatoes.""

"Every time Botany and Zoology fuse, Botany ends up screwed to the wall.""

"I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way."

"Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to improve our response now, based on science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged. There will be likely a resurgence of Covid-19 this fall that will be greatly compounded by the challenges of seasonal influenza. Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history."

"We need to be truthful with the American people. Americans deserve the truth. The truth must be based on science. We have the world's greatest scientists. Let us lead. Let us speak without fear of retribution. We must listen. Each of us can and must do our part now."

"I believe with proper leadership and collaboration across government, with the best science leading the way, we can devise a comprehensive strategy, we can devise a plan that includes all Americans and help them help us guide us through this pandemic. The window is closing to address this pandemic because we still do not have a standard centralized coordinated plan to take this nation through this response."

"There's no one company that can produce enough for our country or for the world. We need to have a strategy and plan in place now to make sure that we can not only fill that vaccine, make it, distribute it, administer it in a fair and equitable plan. We don't have that yet and it is a significant concern."

"Rep. Butterfield: How could we be struggling to get adequate supplies of simple supplies like swabs? What does this say about the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak? Bright: It says to me, sir, that there is no master coordinated plan on how to respond to this outbreak."

"Lives were endangered, and I believe lives were lost. Not only that, we were forced to procure the supplies from other countries without the right quality standards, so even our doctors and nurses in the hospitals today are wearing N95-marked masks from other countries that are not providing the sufficient protection that a US-standard N95 mask would provide them."

"We need to unleash the voices of the scientists in our public health system in the United States so they can be heard and their guidances need to be listened to."

"Republican lawmakers on the panel for the most part were careful not to attack Bright directly. But Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., slammed Bright for continuing to collect his $285,000 salary while first on sick leave for a spike in blood pressure, and now on vacation as he tries to straighten out his work situation. “You’re too sick to go into work, but you’re well enough to come here while getting paid,” said Mullin. “I have a hard time understanding that.”"

"There are few contemporary reviews of whole-ocean neuston ecosystems. I started with smaller studies on specific animals and worked my way through their references. One reference, in Russian Cyrillic, came up again and again. This made sense. I knew the United States and the U.S.S.R. had both developed extensive oceanographic-research programs after World War II, but each region published in its own language, making overlap difficult. I sat with a librarian for nearly an hour, hunting this study down. Finally, we found it: a 1956 study published in the U.S.S.R., in Russian, by an oceanographer named A. I. Savilov. This led us to another study of his from 1968, mercifully translated into English. Savilov spent his career studying the neuston by conducting extensive surveys all across the Pacific and synthesizing this work into a map of the open-ocean surface ecosystems. Savilov described seven unique neuston meadows in the open ocean, each with its own unique composition of animals. Just as rainforests differ from temperate forests, these neustonic ecosystems are unique."

"The Ocean Cleanup was founded with the vision of clearing the world’s ocean of Plastic. The project’s goals are ambitious, and it plans to launch approximately 60 systems to reduce “the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans by at least 90% by 2040.” It is starting with what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but is already scoping out other targets, too. Even without an environmental-impact assessment, it’s easy to imagine what will happen if the Ocean Cleanup succeeds. Neuston and plastic co-occur: They’re in the exact same spots. Cleaning up 90 percent of the plastic using the current method means potentially destroying 90 percent of the neuston. This reality is built into the project’s design. Plastics mimic the neuston world—it’s buoyant, surface bound, and rubbery. When wind and ocean currents sweep neuston through the project’s barrier, animals such as blue sea dragons will be corralled and confined in a huge trap, their fragile bodies colliding with hard and jagged surfaces. They cannot sink below or swim around. They will be suffocated, crushed, and hauled to landfills. The fact that we don’t have a solid understanding of the neuston ecosystem is even more worrying: We will have very little “before” data to compare the Ocean Cleanup’s impact against."

"The Ocean Cleanup says it wants to protect animals at the ocean’s surface from plastic, but neuston is the ecosystem of the ocean’s surface. There is a reason turtles and sunfish eat floating surface plastic: It looks like neuston. Using these wall-like barriers to collect plastic in spite of the neuston is like clear-cutting a canopy in the name of helping a forest. There is no point in collecting plastic if by the end there is nothing left to conserve."

"There are some mysteries so big that they will take the whole world to solve them."

"There's still so much we don't know about these creatures. But if glitter worms teach us anything, it's that even in the harshest places there is still wonder and beauty. Times are tough, but never forget the awe and majesty of life on this strange blue planet."

"I don't expect people to become entomologists or even necessarily to love bugs, but at least to think before reflexively stepping on them. They are just capable of the most amazing things, and many of the things that they do we couldn't survive on this planet without them doing."

"The best thing people can do is to stop assuming that insects don’t belong on this planet and that it’s our job to destroy them. Insects have lived on Earth far longer than humans have, in many more different places, and they’ve found at least a million different ways to make a living here—we’re living on their planet, not the other way around. My hope is not that everyone will become an entomologist but that more people will appreciate insects for their amazing diversity and adaptability."

"Scientific knowledge helps people to understand and appreciate the world and all of its complexities; it’s the best insurance against irrational fear."

"There are no child prodigies in biology. Future physicists may play with radios or electronics, forcing electrons to flow along wire paths through light bulbs or amplifiers, but there is no comparable pastime for biologists. Nature-watching is no substitute. Simply looking at frogs is no more instructive than looking at a radio: the tinkering is is the important component. Perhaps someday, when molecular biology has reached elementary and secondary schools, promising young biologists will play with molecular biology sets the way chemists and physicists play with chemistry sets and circuit boards. As it is, most young biologists do no experiments before college. Of the few who do, almost all experiment with chemistry sets, only to switch to biology in college when they learn about its experimental possibilities."

"T cell help to B cells is a fundamental aspect of adaptive immunity and the generation of immunological memory. Follicular helper CD4 T (TFH) cells are the specialized providers of B cell help. TFH cells depend on expression of the master regulator transcription factor Bcl6. Distinguishing features of TFH cells are the expression of CXCR5, PD-1, SAP (SH2D1A), IL-21, and ICOS, among other molecules, and the absence of Blimp-1 (prdm1). TFH cells are important for the formation of germinal centers. Once germinal centers are formed, TFH cells are needed to maintain them and to regulate germinal center B cell differentiation into plasma cells and memory B cells. This review covers TFH differentiation, TFH functions, and human TFH cells, discussing recent progress and areas of uncertainty or disagreement in the literature, and it debates the developmental relationship between TFH cells and other CD4 T cell subsets (Th1, Th2, Th17, iTreg)."

"Tfh cell differentiation is a multistage, multifactorial process. There is no single event that defines Tfh cell differentiation, unlike T helper 1 (Th1) cell differentiation, for instance, which can be fully induced by interleukin-12 (IL-12) exposure in vitro or in vivo. Instead, Tfh cell differentiation is a multistep, multisignal process that also accommodates a significant amount of heterogeneity."

"‘Help’ to B cells is not a single product of TFH cells and not even a single process. T cell help to B cells can be divided into seven distinct functions, ... : proliferation, survival, plasma cell differentiation, somatic hypermutation, class-switch recombination, adhesion and attraction. These seven different forms of help are all contributors to TFH cell–B cell interactions, and each process consists of multiple pathways ... Furthermore, some molecules have a role in several different forms of help."

"Although T cell help to B cells was one of the very first defined functions of T cells (Crotty, 2015), the identification of the CD4+ T cell subset responsible for T cell-dependent humoral immune responses developed much later. The term T follicular helper (Tfh) cell was coined in a series of studies on human tonsillar germinal center (GC) CD4+ T cells and CXCR5+ CD4+ T cells in blood (Crotty, 2011). Early converts rightly point to those papers as seminal for establishing the field, but it was not until Bcl6 was determined to be a lineage-defining transcription factor (TF) of Tfh cells that Tfh cells were broadly accepted among immunologists as a distinct lineage of helper CD4+ T cells and required for GCs. That trifecta of papers was published 10 years ago (Johnston et al., 2009, Nurieva et al., 2009, Yu et al., 2009), including the demonstration that the TFs Blimp1 and Bcl6 are potent reciprocal antagonists (Johnston et al., 2009) …"

"Two independent groups of investigators have found evidence of an enzyme in virions of RNA tumour viruses which synthesizes DNA from an RNA template. This discovery, if upheld, will have important implications not only for carcinogenesis by RNA viruses but also for the general understanding of genetic transcription: apparently the classical process of information transfer from DNA to RNA can be inverted."

"The world of animal viruses appears to offer an unfathomable diversity of specimens, but, as the molecular biology of the replication of many viruses has been studied, a pattern of behavior has emerged. The viruses can be divided into classes, each of which has its own method of transmitting its genetic information from one generation to the next and its own style of expressing its genetic information. Although in some cases the data are still fragmentary, it is possible to outline the behavior of these systems and to place them in a formal scheme."

"This milestone of biology's megaproject is the long-promised draft DNA sequence from the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (the public project). The sequence itself is available to all those connected to the Internet … In the paper in this issue, we are presented with a description of the strategy used to decipher the structures of the huge DNA molecules that constitute the genome, and with analyses of the content encoded in the genome. It is the achievement of a coordinated effort involving 20 laboratories and hundreds of people around the world. It reflects the scientific community at its best: working collaboratively, pooling its resources and skills, keeping its focus on the goal, and making its results available to all as they were acquired."

"As long as I have been in science, which is let's say 1960 to today, just about every five years there are major changes in technology that allow you to do things that you previously either said were just too hard or there was no way to do them — or which you hadn't imagined that you could ever do."

"The prominence of Watson and Crick and the Phage Group made Baltimore all the more desperate to do some real experimental biology. During the spring of his junior year, Baltimore became president of the Biology Club and enrolled in a microbiology seminar that discussed the advances of Luria, Delbrück, Lederberg, and others. But he was sick of just talking about biology. He had understood very quickly that designing and completing experiments were the accomplishments that make a biologist; gathering an encyclopedia knowledge of facts simply makes a good student."

"Viral genomes must make mRNA that can be read by host ribosomes ... David Baltimore (Nobel laureate) used this insight to describe a simple way to think about virus genomes ... The original Baltimore scheme missed one genome type: the gapped DNA of the Hepadnaviridae ..."

"There are approximately two billion cells in the nervous system of a human being. The process of thinking in any individual is partly dependent upon the variable arrangement of these cells. Therefore no person can think exactly as another, any more than he can change his facial features to duplicate the facial features of another. If people would remember this fact and regulate their attitudes towards others to conform to it, it would encourage the exercise of tolerance, the human attribute most needed today."

"Living cells respond to DNA damage by a variety of mechanisms, including a series of biochemical pathways called DNA repair. These include three discrete pathways for the excision of damaged bases, called base excision repair, mismatch repair and nucleotide excision repair (NER). NER in human cells is a complex biochemical process during which a large multiprotein complex is assembled at several types of base damage. This multiprotein complex (NER machine) catalyses the excision of damaged bases as oligonucleotide fragments."

"The aesthetic appeal of the DNA double helix initially hindered notions of DNA mutation and repair, which would necessarily interfere with its pristine state. But it has since been recognized that DNA is subject to continuous damage and the cell has an arsenal of ways of responding to such injury. Although mutations or deficiencies in repair can have catastrophic consequences, causing a range of human diseases, mutations are nonetheless fundamental to life and evolution."

"Because of the questions posed by Schrödinger and the nature of the problem of identifying and describing the gene itself, the early development of molecular biology relied greatly on scientists who brought insights from physics to biology—Max Delbrück, Salvador Luria, George Gamow, Sir Lawrence Bragg, Francis Crick, Max Perutz, John Kendrew, Maurice Wilkins, Desmond Bernal, and Linus Pauling being the best known of these scientists."

"The Shark Attack File offers us an opportunity to not only, I suppose, help humanity at some level by trying to reduce the opportunities for shark and humans to get together and therefore saving some grief among humans, but equally importantly, it allows us to put it into perspective: shark attacks as a phenomenon are a fairly uncommon event. By contrast, our decimation of sharks and ray populations is going on largely unabated. It gives us a bully pulpit to talk about the real concern of the shark in the scientific world, which is the fate of the sharks."

"We tend to forget that when we enter the sea, we’re entering a foreign environment. It’s not ours. We can’t breathe underwater. When we enter the sea, it’s a wilderness experience. In any wilderness experience, there are potential dangers to be involved in that environment. Luckily for us, the sea is a pretty benevolent place. Each year, millions of people enter the sea and come out unscratched and unscathed and oblivious to the notion that they’ve had a wilderness experience. But we all need to remember that, especially if we go in areas where large predators such as white shark live."

"I had jars in my bedroom, much to the chagrin of my mother, you couldn't throw away a mayonnaise jar in my house. That was a specimen jar."

"The thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that."

"His ability to communicate what's going on inspired me, he's my hero."

"I get excited by the fact that we can always learn something new every day. Science is about freedom, and what excites me is that I have the freedom to work on the things I want to work on, which is incredible."

"We have to remember that everything we do is a choice. We have a choice to make more sustainable decisions in the long term, whether it’s how much plastic we use or how much meat we eat – all these things will have an impact on our planet. If we can eat more sustainably, live more sustainably, we’ll have a lower carbon footprint on an individual level. Little things matter – people just need to be reminded of that."

"What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally -- to basically get the message home -- maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths. So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans."

"I was drawn to oceanography by just this kind of challenge. To me it represents the perfect intersection of science, technology and the unknown, the spark for so many breakthrough discoveries about life on our planet."

"We need to make decisions that make us less consumptive and reduce our reliance on nitrogen. It's like a carbon footprint. But you can reduce your nitrogen footprint. I do it by not eating much meat -- I still like a little every now and then -- not using corn oil, driving a car that I can put nonethanol gas in and get better gas mileage. Just things like that that can make a difference. So I'm challenging, not just you, but I challenge a lot of people, especially in the Midwest -- think about how you're treating your land and how you can make a difference. So my steps are very small steps. To change the type of agriculture in the US is going to be many big steps. And it's going to take political and social will for that to happen. But we can do it. I strongly believe we can translate the science, bridge it to policy and make a difference in our environment. We all want a clean environment."

"We want to know what genes the human embryo needs to become a healthy baby."

"This is important because abortion and infertility are very common, but we do not know them well."

"An embryo formed by artificial insemination and genetic manipulation will not become a baby"

"There is a need to make general systems theory more user friendly."

"Three unique and still timely aspects of Miller's text Living Systems were his citation of 173 specific ‘cross-level’ hypotheses, his unification of a vast number of phenomena from the biomedical sciences to the social sciences using a consistent taxonomy of seven hierarchical levels and 20 subsystems, and his consistent effort to make systems hypotheses more testable."

"We concluded then that it was more reasonable to expect a hierarchy of partial theories than to expect one overarching general theory."

"The overall field of systems science is still in formation."

"There is still insufficient integration of the many different strains of systems theory and systems tools."

"There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles... and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is... crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself."

"I believe we have a very broken relationship, at least in the US but probably across the West, where we ask candidates for office about policies that they are going to enact. And it's like a reflex where we want them to tell us 'I'm going to do this this that you want' so they promise us stuff, it doesn't work, they don't have the power to enact it when they get in office or they never meant it in the first place. And we would be much better off, counterintuitive as this sounds, if we assessed their character and their patriotism instead of their policy proposals. My feelin is: I actually don't care what you think of policy. If you impress me, that you're a patriot, that you love the country that I'm a part of, that you want to see it improved, and that your values align with mine so that improved to you also means improved to me, then all I want to know is that you're good at evaluating what policies might get us there."

"Antagonistic pleiotropy, the evolutionary theory of senescence, posits that age related somatic decline is the inevitable late-life by-product of adaptations that increase fitness in early life. That... provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate that reconciles aspects of the 'accumulated damage' 'metabolic rate', and 'oxidative stress' models."

"We hypothesize that (1) in vertebrates, a telomeric fail-safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation. (2) The same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age."

"(3) These patterns are manifestations of an evolved antagonistic pleiotropy in which extrinsic causes of mortality favor a species-optimal balance between tumor suppression and tissue repair."

"(4) With that trade-off as a fundamental constraint, selection adjusts telomere lengths—longer telomeres increasing the capacity for repair, shorter telomeres increasing tumor resistance."

"(5) In environments where extrinsically induced mortality is frequent, selection against senescence is comparatively weak as few individuals live long enough to suffer a substantial phenotypic decline. The weaker the selection against senescence, the further the optimal balance point moves toward shorter telomeres and increased tumor suppression. The stronger the selection against senescence, the farther the optimal balance point moves toward longer telomeres, increasing the capacity for tissue repair, slowing senescence and elevating tumor risks."

"(6) In iteroparous organisms selection tends to co-ordinate rates of senescence between tissues, such that no one organ generally limits life-span."

"[C]aptive-rodent breeding protocols, designed to increase reproductive output, simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation. Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence."

"Why is an evolutionary theorist talking about climate change? ...[C]limate change is not really a problem, it's more a symptom of a problem... that caused the financial collapse of 2008, that caused the in the Gulf in 2010, and the ongoing Fukushima disaster starting in March of 2011."

"[T]he boundaries of the evolutionary environment do not stop at the market's edge."

"Strategies evolve within markets and their larger regulatory context."

"[A]ll of our environmental problems look like... somebody making a profit for degrading what belongs to the rest of us. ...[T]his behavior should not be allowed within a marketplace. We are fracturing the world. We are liquidating it, we are draining it, we are denuding it, we are over-exploiting it. It is apparent to anyone... The idea that this should not be allowed is transparent."

"We have to ask ourselves, what fraction of the economic activity that surrounds us is profitable only by virtue of the fact that those who make the money are externalizing the cost to somebody else. If we were to eliminate such behaviors, we would... reduce the amount of activity by a lot... but we would reduce it by exactly the fraction of activities that shouldn't have existed in the first place."

"The agents in the market are responding to opportunities that we have left open. It makes no more sense to be angry at them... than it does to be angry at the mosquito for sucking your blood. ...[Y]ou have to close down the opportunity."

"In the case that... what is good for the company is somewhat different than what is good for society, the ruthless corporation has the greatest advantage... because it can do anything it wants, and the corporation that is bound by what's good for society can't do anything. The corporation that tries to balance these concerns finds that it competes best with the ruthless corporation the more ruthless it becomes, and the outcome is predictable."

"[I]n sectors of our economy where there is not a lot of room for utility-increasing innovations, we see an evolution towards ruthlessness... and that has interacted with... the central flaw in... our global system, with the U.S. at its head. What we have... are loops... Wealth that is made in the market is capable of increasing one's power over regulation. Power over regulation allows increased opportunity to make money in the market. This is a positive feedback loop. That should scare any engineer of biologist because positive feedback loops that are not bounded by some negative feedback force are unstable. They detonate. They explode."

"[T]his feedback loop has re-engineered our system cryptically and turned it into an engine for the concentration of wealth and power. ...It has installed amongst an unelected group of very powerful and wealthy people effective power over any attempt to change from the status quo."

"[T]he personal responsibility vortex... sucks good people in... [W]e should redirect any effort that we are tempted to spend on personal responsibility, towards collective action... that can restructure the s that surround the market so that we... have a chance of altering the behavior."

"[T]here are two types of systems... One type... the costs of sustaining the system go to the benevolent. That system will inevitably evolve toward ruthlessness and instability. The converse system... where the costs of maintaining the society go to the ruthless evolves towards benevolence and stability. Whenever policy is in question, we should ask ourselves, "Does the policy lead in the direction of the one type or the other."

"We need to place a firewall that is impermeable between the marketplace and the regulatory apparatus."

"[W]e need to rethink the way we keep track of behavior in the marketplace. We need full cost accounting... every cost that is generated by an activity in the market needs to show up in the balance sheet, whether that is borrowing from future generations, whether that is putting the population at risk. ...They need to be included in the price of the product or otherwise returned to those who decided to initiate the action. If we did that, the amount of activity would drop... to exactly those behaviors that are actually beneficial to society, leaving out all of those externalities that are generating so much profit with our current system."

"As far as the academy is concerned, these ideas are a direct threat to the ability of the academy to continue to teach. Because what we saw here, at Evergreen, was the descendants of critical theory challenged the right of students and faculty to engage in science. They actually confronted us as if science was just another mechanism of wielding power. And if they do that, if that happens across the country, collages and universities will not be the place where science happens. And science will continue, it will have to reformulate itself outside the collage and university system. And when it does that the justification for a collage and university system vanishes. Who's gonna send their kid to a collage that doesn't have science at its core? So anyway, I think this is actually a threat to the academy as a whole."

"[O]ne can now advance... policies, and almost certainly succeed... if they are properly draped in weaponized terminology. "Equity", for example, has taken on special properties. If a person opposes an "equity" proposal, those advancing the proposal are secure in asserting that their opponent is motivated by opposition to racial equity itself: In other words, that they are racist. ...[O]ne’s right to speak is now dictated by adherence to an ascendant orthodoxy in which one’s race, gender and sexual orientation are paramount."

"Is there a free speech crisis on college campuses? ...What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control—speech is impeded as a last resort, used when people fail to self-censor in response to a threat of crippling stigma and the destruction of their capacity to earn. These tools are being used to unhook the values that bind us together as a nation—equal protection under the law, the presumption of innocence, a free marketplace of ideas, the concept that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Yes, even that core tenet of the civil rights movement is being dismantled."

"Weaponized "equity" is a means to an unacceptable and dangerous end, and it is already spreading from college campuses to other institutions... The emergence of this mentality, and this style of argument, at the highest levels of the tech sector and the press should alarm us greatly. The courts will not be far behind."

"Something is seriously and dangerously amiss. At this moment in history, the center does not hold. and political corruption have rendered government ineffective, predatory and often cruelly indifferent to the suffering of American citizens. is a natural result."

"As a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, I find myself at the vanguard of an emerging non-ideological, non-partisan movement. Along with and the (FIRE), we are fighting to restore and respect for competing perspectives."

"The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it. My advice to this body is to put the nation and its core values ahead of partisanship and join us in the center to end this cultish power-grab, and return us to a forward path as a nation."

"[F]ree speech is the wrong framework to be thinking about this, and... it has very little to do with college campuses. ...What happened at Evergreen that caused it to become a national story was that an unstoppable force met an immovable object. ...I was the immovable object ...for the moment, let's just chalk that up to a personality defect."

"[I]mmovable objects are vanishingly rare in an academic context... If you're going to do it on the faculty side, you really need to have tenure, and in order to get tenure a lot of the things that you have to do train you not to be an immovable object. So there are very few immovable objects on college campuses, and that's a problem."

"I stood up for three reasons. One... I felt an obligation to do it... it was the right thing to do. Two... manipulative bullies... Three, I thought that I was positioned to endure and repel the accusation that I absolutely knew was going to come back. Why did I think I was well positioned? ...I had tenure. I was well liked by students of every description, who knew me very well... and knew that I was not a bigot. I thought that would protect me. My own personal history was also completely inconsistent with the claim that I am a racist. ...I was wrong."

"The thing that allowed me to endure the challenge of the phony equity and inclusion forces was that they were unable to keep the story in-house. ...Sam Harris, my brother , and Joe Rogan ...took the video that the protestors themselves had posted and amplified it, and broadcast it. ...[T]here is a principle that applies to institutions like colleges and universities... It is PV = nRT... the ... they turned up the heat and they added pressure, and that caused the vessel to explode, and when it did, my story became public, and survival became a possibility, because outside eyes... in reviewing it, the answer became obvious. I was not a racist. Something else was going on."

"[T]he third point... What is taking place is actually a threat to the Republic... in one of two ways. The first possible failure mode is that some sort of a Maoist takeover could escape the colleges and universities and... it could take over the West... I find this unlikely... but what I do find very frightening is the possibility that the self-censorship is going to cause colleges and universities to fail in their mission to educate people how to think about difficult issues."

"If the next generation of people to take over the West does not know how to think, western civilization will come apart and it will be replaced in the way that civilizations before it have been. ...What we face is a very dire problem."

"Humans are exquisitely sensitive, for very good evolutionary reasons... to being excluded from a group. ...[T]hat's effectively fatal for a hunter-gatherer, so... we very naturally act in our own self-protection by doing whatever is necessary to rejoin. ...[Y]ou exist in a very large population. If you take up the habit—the rationality community... coined a term for this called steelmanning (the IDW has borrowed it)... [Y]ou do your best to present the argument, of those that disagree with you, so well that they recognize you as having done it right. ...If you do it out of habit, certain people will reject you. They're doing you a favor. They're telling you to seek higher quality people... [S]ome of the things that are hard in life will cost you friends, but the quality of your friend group will be upgraded by the process. It's very painful... but if you'll just trust that this process will result in people... that you want to find yourself around when things get really serious, then you'll be glad you've done it."

"Human beings... we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. ...It's where our flexibility comes from. ...We are robots in which ...a large fraction of the ...behavioral capacity has been off-loaded to the software layer which gets written and re-written over evolutionary time. That means, effectively, that... the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural... and the conscious layer, and not in the hardware, or a hard coding way. That layer is prone to make errors... [C]hildren make absurd errors all the time... That's part of the process... It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term, does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. ...Things are being created, they're being destroyed, and... obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like... freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies, and I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern. ...I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say, I haven't heard a better idea."

"[T]here is something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring... [T]he majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense... but the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide... the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid of it. ...Yeah, but that 1% ... is the key. ...Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, ... [T]here's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know... Yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad, and hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out."

"[My] work... looked at the fact that shortening was being looked at by two different groups... by people interested in counteracting the aging process, and... in exactly the opposite fashion, by people who were interested in tumorigenesis in cancer. ...Tumors ...always had active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt in the lengthening of telomeres... to counteract cancer, and the folks that were studying the process were interested in lengthening telomeres... to generate greater repair capacity. ...[M]y point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves, are providing a benefit in youth... that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient, and eventually die. ...[T]hat matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams..."

"In the U.S. we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination... I've seen estimates of 25,000 dead in the U.S. ...[Y]ou can make the argument ...the necessity of immunizing the population to drive the SARS-CoV-2 to extinction is such that it's an acceptable number, but... If that was really your point that... many more will die if we don't do this... you would not be inoculating people who had had COVID-19, which is a large population. There is no reason to expose those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them, is greater. So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face the risk of death if this was really about an acceptable number deaths arising out of this... set of vaccines."

"I... struggle to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects... this is earlier in their development, therefore it impacts systems that are still forming. They tolerate COVID well, and so the benefit to them is very small, and so the only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think, and therefore they may be integral to the way virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that we're inoculating children... we were doing it to protect old, infirm people who are the most likely to succumb... What society puts children in danger, robs children of life, to save old infirm people. That's upside-down."

"[T]here's something about the way we are... vaccinating... who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending don't exist, that suggests that to some set of people, vaccinating... is a good in and of itself. That that is the objective of the exercise, not herd immunity."

"[T]he veterinary deworming drug has become the new hydroxychloroquine in that it is being promoted as a highly effective treatment against COVID-19—and by many of the same people... despite evidence that is, at best very weak and at worst completely negative. Unfortunately, with the publication of two new and biased reviews, the "HCQ vibe" about ivermectin is stronger than ever. ...I concede that it is possible that has clinically relevant antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2. Based on current evidence, however, it seems unlikely that it does, when considerations are taken into account. As I routinely used to say when discussing hydroxychloroquine, I’d be happy to change my mind if compelling scientific evidence for ivermectin were published. It’s just that neither of these reviews qualify, nor do any of the clinical trials I’ve seen thus far. That’s why I agree that ivermectin shouldn’t be used to treat COVID-19 outside of the context of a well-designed clinical trial with a strong scientific rationale. Certainly, the conspiracy mongering by Bret Weinstein, , and their fans are not leading me to reconsider that opinion."

"I love a challenge, and saving the Earth is probably a good one. We all know the Earth is in trouble. We have now entered in the 6X, the sixth major extinction on this planet. I often wondered, if there was a United Organization of Organisms -- otherwise known as "Uh-Oh" and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet, or off the planet? I think that vote is occurring right now."

"We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it."

"Clearly there’s some entity that doesn’t really include us, the professors and students, and doesn’t really protect our academic freedom, I think, the way that it should."

"what we're really trying to do here is protect this ocean pyramid, and that ocean pyramid connects to our own pyramid of life. It's an ocean planet, and we think of ourselves as a terrestrial species, but the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected. And it's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves."

"The battle of the sexes is no myth. Success at sexual reproduction is at the heart of the evolutionary process. But greater success for her often means less success for him. The upshot? An eternal war—and an astounding diversity of strategies."

"As we shall see, when females mate with more than one male, War capers nimbly through the boudoirs, imps of discord frolicking in his wake."

"Boys, I’m afraid the way to a woman’s bed is often through her stomach."

"If a proclivity for promiscuity is genetic, then yes, promiscuous behavior will become more common if loose females tend to have more children than their monogamous peers. That’s how natural selection works."

"Natural selection, it seems, often smiles on strumpets. Sorry, boys."

"You’ve just got a case of SINBAD: Single Income, No Babe, Absolutely Desperate."

"I’m afraid that females in many species often provoke males into fighting over them. When the mood strikes, they make themselves conspicuous—then stand back and watch the battle, before mating with the winner."

"Indeed, natural selection discriminates against well-behaved losers."

"Evolution does not obey human notions of morality, nor is human morality a reflection of some natural law. The deadly sins would be different if they mirrored evolutionary no-no’s. Lust, for one, would be deemed a virtue; chastity would be deplored."

"Sex is any process that mixes genes from different individuals."

"There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine. Yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we've spent on space exploration. We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth."

"Quorum sensing, or the control of gene expression in response to cell density, is used by both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria to regulate a variety of physiological functions. In all cases, quorum sensing involves the production and detection of extracellular signalling molecules called autoinducers. While universal signalling themes exist, variations in the design of the extracellular signals, the signal detection apparatuses, and the biochemical mechanisms of signal relay have allowed quorum sensing systems to be exquisitely adapted for their varied uses."

"Quorum sensing-controlled behaviors are those that only occur when bacteria are at high cell population densities. These behaviors are ones that are unproductive when undertaken by an individual bacterium but become effective by the simultaneous action of a group of cells. For example, quorum sensing regulates bioluminescence, virulence factor expression, biofilm formation, sporulation, and mating. Quorum sensing is achieved through the production, release, and subsequent detection of and response to threshold concentrations of signal molecules called autoinducers. The accumulation of a stimulatory concentration of an extracellular autoinducer can only occur when a sufficient number of cells, a “quorum,” is present."

"... if we could either keep harmful bacteria from communicating, or help beneficial bacteria to communicate, those could be new kinds of therapeutics that could be developed in the future."

"When those of us who are now middle-aged went to high school and to college, what we learned about cancer was completely descriptive. We learned how cancer cells look compared to the way normal cells look and it was beautiful, it was elegant. We learned how cancerous organs look compared to the way normal organs look. We learned about how patients decline with cancer. But it was very frustrating at least for me, because we didn’t have any understanding or sense of why these processes were occurring. Exactly what was happening, why it was it happening, when was it happening, how was it happening, all the questions you ask of mystery. We now don’t have them all answered — if it were an easy problem it would have long since been solved. But we do have a very good sense of the kinds of changes that a cell undergoes between the time it is a normal cell and the time that it is growing completely out of control, causes a tumor that can invade, metastasize and kill its host."

"When women our age started in the field, there were very few of us, and we were absolutely on the margins. People pretty much ignored us. I have come to realize that there was a great freedom in being ignored, that you could go after huge questions, because nobody noticed."

"And my mother shrieked ... "You can't leave that child here alone!" And, you know, fair enough. And this unmistakable voice, above and behind me, said, "Emily and I will be fine." And I turned around and said, "Thank you." And my mother looked at me and said, "You can't leave Emily with a total stranger!" And I said, "Mom, if you can't trust Joe DiMaggio, who can you trust?""

"The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability... which could undermine... scientific progress..."

"Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability..."

"In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. These... social indicators are... related... dynamically. They... experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. ...50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020."

"We are also entering a dip in the so-called ... This could mean that future recessions will be severe."

"All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020."

"We need to find ways to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization... Economic inequality, accompanied by burgeoning public debt, can be addressed by making tax rates more progressive."

"[W]e should not expand our system of higher education... An excess of young people with advanced degrees has been one of the chief causes of instability..."

"A group consisting entirely of self-regarding agents will never be able to cooperate. So cooperation is possible only if some agents are motivated by ‘extra-rational’ prosocial norms, including the norm of moralistic punishment."

"This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe..."

"This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010."

"Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected... the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability."

"Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom."

"Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions."

"[S]uch measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries."

"How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks?"

"Can we model and forecast the dynamics of social resilience and its opposite, social breakdown?"

"[G]rowing socio-political instability results from multiple interacting factors: economic, political, and cultural."

"(SDT) offers a... wholistic framework for investigating such... forces that... lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio-political instability."

"SDT can be... an explicit computational model capable of forecasting future... social unrest and political violence in specific social systems."

"... was proposed by and further developed and tested by... investigators, including [S.] Nefedov, Turchin, [and] Korotayev et al."

"The SDT proposes that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are... similar to processes that cause earthquakes. In both... it is useful to distinguish "pressures" (structural conditions, which build up slowly) from "triggers" (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption)."

"Specific triggers... are difficult, perhaps... impossible to predict. ...[S]tructural pressures build up slowly and more predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting."

"Many triggering events... are ultimately caused by pent-up social pressures ...[i.e.,] the structural factors."

"The main focus of SDT... is on the structural pressures undermining social resilience."

"The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks."

"The focus [is] on only these four structural components... [E]ach component has a number of attributes that change dynamically in response to... [the] other... variables."

"[T]he... forecast: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe” ...was not simply a projection of the current trend in social instability into the future. ...[T]he basis for this forecast was a quantitative model that took as inputs the major SD drivers for instability (immiseration, intraelite competition, and state (in)capacity) and translated them into the Political Stress Indicator (PSI)... strongly correlated with socio-political instability. The rising curve of the... PSI... suggests a growing future socio-political instability."

"SDT is a general theory that guides our understanding of political violence dynamics and social breakdown in all large-scale state-level societies."

"[W]e need to translate the general theory into a specific computational model tailored to the focal state. Over the past four decades this has been accomplished for... historical case-studies, ranging from Ancient empires to Early Modern states and nineteenth century’s revolutions and civil wars."

"[T]he theory has been applied to two contemporary societies. The first... is a structural-demographic model for the... USA... the basis for the 2010 prediction. The details... were published [by] Turchin and later expanded into a book-length treatment."

"was proposed 30 years ago. Although it was successively refined by other theorists... the theoretical core, and especially the emphasis on intra-elite competition and conflict as the most important driver of socio-political instability and state breakdown, remained constant. Over the past three decades, the theory was empirically tested by a growing number of researchers. Currently, there are detailed investigations of at least twenty crises... to test the predictions of the theory... [T]here are several dozen other less detailed examples. The... verdict is that.. predictions are well supported by data. ...[R]ival theories are not supported."

"[T]he "crude" Malthusian explanation, which connects popular immiseration to social breakdown, fails to account both for the start and end of the "Time of Troubles.""

"Many of the historical "Golden Ages" were... golden... only for the elites, whose high levels of consumption were based on low real wages and falling consumption levels of the great majority..."

"[W]hile declining living standards are often a contributing factor to... instability, reversing this trend does not end instability until elite overproduction is... reversed..."

"Making scientific predictions about the events that happened, but are not known to the authors of the theory, is a valid scientific approach in historical sciences, such as geology, astrophysics, evolutionary biology, and (history as science). It is sometimes referred to as "". ...[T]he primary way of testing theories in historical dynamics is retrodiction. But when mulitple successful tests using retrodiction (prediction about the past) are complemented with a few cases of prediction about the future, our degree of confidence in the theory is... enhanced."

"The SDT is not merely a theory for understanding why internal violence outbreaks develop and spike. By providing... understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and societal breakdown, SDT... gives us tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers of instability."

"[N]one of the fundamental structural-demographic drivers have been reversed, so far. Thus, the American social system continues to be very vulnerable to additional "quakes"."

"[D]isease outbreaks occur much more frequently during... crisis periods. Such epidemics historically have had a disproportionate effect on the less advantaged... and the Covid-19 pandemic was not an exception. ...[I]n terms of ... the pandemic... further worsened the well-being of large swaths of the American population... consequently, drove up the mass-mobilization potential. ...[G]overnmental dysfunction in dealing with the pandemic, coupled with intra-elite infighting, will likely further depress... trust in government institutions. Thus... the coronavirus has... further destabilize[d] the American ."

"[U]ntil the fundamental SD drivers for instability are reversed, there will be other triggering events... social turbulence may continue for years ahead."

"Historical data indicate that periods of enhanced instability and internal warfare usually extend for many years, with the median length... 10–15 years range."

"SDT gives us understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and... tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers... It remains to be seen whether our society will be able to use these tools."

"I began my career... as an ecologist... studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. ...I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which mixes computer modeling with Big Data analytics to answer such questions as... why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles. By the late 1990s... I began to consider how the same... approach could be brought to the study of human societies. A quarter of a century later, my colleagues... and I have built out a flourishing field... (from Clio... the... Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change)..."

"[T]here are important recurring patterns... throughout... human history over the past ten thousand years."

"[C]omplex human societies at base and at some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles."

"[M]y colleagues and I... focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse."

"It became clear... through quantitative historical analysis that [throughout time] complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a... degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces..."

"In 2010... Nature asked specialists... to look ten years into the future, and I made this case... judging from the pattern of US history, we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s. ...The book is my best attempt to explain this model... I make no claims of radical originality."

"[S]ocieties have arrived at this crossroads before, and though... most of the time...the road has led to great loss of life and societal breakdown, sometimes it has led to a far happier resolution ..."

"[W]hen a state... has stagnating or declining ... a growing gap between the rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt... Historically such developments have served as leading indicators of political instability. In the United States all of these... started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to... around 2020... a spike in political instability. And here we are."

"... uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record... as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions..."

"The main question... Whether there is economic inequality, and social and political instability? Growing economic inequality, especially inequality in income and wealth, is currently a broadly shared concern. It has been a lot of the topics in the Davos meetings... and it is often adduced that growing inequality is a source of political discord. But is it? And if it's the case, how does it do it? What is the direct mechanism?"

"[T]here are some reasons to doubt that growing inequality might be a direct mechanism... of instability, because humans are very bad at perceiving inequality. ...[A] number of studies ...show that people, when... asked to estimate the degree of income or wealth inequality... their opinions essentially have nothing to do with what is actually... measured by economists."

"[I]nequality is an excellent proxy for the actual mechanisms that drive instability, but the actual drivers... are several, of which I will focus on two: popular immiseration and . ...[A]t a deep structural level the force that drives those and ultimately instability, is what I would refer to as the "wealth pump.""

"Let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal... asked a number of scientists to make some forecasts for the next decade... (2010-2020) and that's when I published the forecast that.., the growing political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. ...10 years later ...together with my coauthor, , we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality, and... this is one of the graphs... We looked at several measures of instability, one was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when you look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right... [A]s the paper was [under] review, the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of George Floyd have exploded and... in January of 2021 we had the shocking event... known as the Storming of the Capitol."

"So the forecast seems to have been quite good. The question is "What was it based on?" It was not... a prophecy, it was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based. ...[T]he forecast was a scientific prediction in the sense that I wanted to stick my neck out [and] make an out-of-sample prediction to see whether the mechanisms that have been identified by our theory... actually are working in the way that we thought..."

"[T]his is , and it posits several forces that drive social instability and political violence. ...I'll focus on two main ones. ...First ... potential ...based on popular immiseration resulting from the decreased living standards for the majority of the population... This is a fairly obvious effect of growing inequality... Since the days of Malthus this... force has been much in discussion."

"[T]he second condition... is absolutely much more predictive of immediate troubles to come, and that's intraelite competition which results... when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result... we have too many elite aspirants vying for a limited number of positions... causes... intraelite competition, eventually conflict, and that... in our analysis of about 100... cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out... That turns out to be the most universal and most important force."

"[T]here are other dimensions. The state fragility and international environment, especially for smaller countries, international environment plays quite a role, but I will focus on the first two."

"I'll use the example of the United States, which I have studied from inside out... over the past 20 years, and I will illustrate how these few forces... have laid out in real life... a particular example..."

"Let's look at ... wages adjusted for inflation. ...In the late 1970s there was a definite phase transition. Up to that point, for the previous two generations, the wages for both unskilled and manufacturing workers had been growing quite rapidly and almost linearly... [W]ages for manufacturing workers increased... fourfold... a quite remarkable achievement... [I]t was unprecedented in human history to see such a long-term sustained increase in general well-being. Then... the wages stagnated, or even declined. So what was the reason?"

"GDP per capita shows no break in the 1970s. It slowed down... around the financial crisis of 2007–2008..."

"What about ? ...By elites I mean the small percentage of population that concentrates social power in their hands. ...[I]t's a neutral definition. It's neither good nor bad. They're simply power holders."

"What does the wealth pump do on the elite side..? Declining relative wages of workers set up this wealth pump that transfers wealth from workers to the economic elites... [A]s a result... a larger fraction of GDP goes to... the economic elites, which are both capital holders and top layers of administration of corporations (corporate officers). ...[T]his creates a favorable economic conjuncture for the economic elites and results in higher rates of upward social mobility. Elite numbers, as a result... grow and so does their consumption levels."

"So far so good. But the problem is, as in many dynamical systems, there are some delayed effects of such dynamics. ...Here are some numbers on the relative distribution of wealth in the American population. You have good data from 1983 to 2019... when we look at the percentage of households with [inflation adjusted in 1995 US dollars] net worth exceeding... Millionaires, roughly 10% of the population (7% now) increased from 3% to 7% but then growth in... classes such as decamillionaires was even more remarkable... more than fivefold, sixfold increase in the proportion of households that have 10 million dollars wealth, or more."

"[T]he problem is... if the wealth pump is allowed to run long enough, eventually... the growing elite numbers and their consumption levels will overshoot the productive base, which is what the workers are producing."

"...[A]s a result ...the new elites, let's call them the elite aspirants... their numbers... begin to be so large that there is not enough power positions in... politics or in economics [e.g., corporations]... That's fixed, and as the numbers of elite aspirants vying for these positions increase, then first... the result... is intraelite competition, and secondly... the numbers of frustrated elite aspirants who are denied access to these positions begins to explode."

"So here you see... in the political domain... in just the decade from 2000-2010... the number of candidates who have spent half a million dollars or more of their own money... the millionaires... have doubled during this period."

"Many of the wealth holders... aim to translate their economic power into political power... [A]nother measure is the cost of winning ...has been growing also, showing a greater demand for these positions and greater willingness to spend money..."

"Not all of these candidates are wealthy in their own right. Many of the newly wealthy... instead of running themselves... fund other individuals."

"[E]ssentially the effect of increasing the number of wealth holders is translated into increased competition for political positions."

"[T]he problem is that as we get greater numbers of these surplus elites... some of them turn into... counter-elites... the individuals who are willing to challenge... the reigning regime, and in history often... by violent means, and in fact this is happening in the United States... they're willing to break the rules of the game."

"So this is how drives intraelite competition, intraelite conflicts, rise of the counter-elites and then sociopolitical instability."

"[I]nequality... at least in this model, is not a direct driver. It's a proxie for the direct drivers, which is immiseration and elite overproduction."

"This is what I did in... Ages of Discord, I looked at more than 200 years of American history... an aggregated measure of well being... the blue curve has gone through two cycles, and the red curve is a measure of instability..."

"My colleague has expressed a pessimistic view in his book The Great Leveler... where he says the death is the great leveler so... a major violent shock is needed to reverse the economic inequality. I... look at this a bit more optimistically. Essentially entering into the crisis is relatively stereotypical, that's what our CrisisDB investigations show... [I]t's really conflict that plays a key role, together with mass organization. But the exit is usually contingent, and in fact there could be both good and bad outcomes, as indicated in this graph. Sometimes the decline is mild and followed by rapid recovery, but you... can also have complete collapse."

"[W]e actually looked at outcomes of crises, measuring them by a collapse. I don't like the word "collapse" because who knows what collapse means. So... we broke it up into various dimensions, and then we can look at more than 100 cases in CrisisDB, and look at the distribution of the severity (where we basically sum of the possible bad things that can happen in societies). Most of the time the crises lead to pretty dire consequences, but there is about 10-15% of cases where the elites manage to pull together, adopt the right set of reforms, and sail the ship of the state through the turbulent waters without major bloodshed."

"To conclude, the structural causes of Ages of Discord... I have shown the example using the United States, but... they are quite generic. ...[T]hey show up... in more than 100... past crises. ...[W]e are now in the United States ...clearly in crisis. ...We are at the cusp. ...In fact, collective actions can result in positive... or negative outcomes. What will happen we will see."

"[A]t a very deep and abstract level these forces, immiseration and elite overproduction... are playing out in very similar ways in very different societies. However, ...the theory has to be tailored to each society because ...the critical dimension is what's happening to the elites. Now different societies have ...a variety of ways in which the elites are defined and ...regenerated ...so even if you look at western democracies, you compare the United States, let's say to France, the United States is basically a plutocracy, the reigning elite is the economic elite in collaboration with the political elites. But France is a bureaucracy. In France the elites are created in different ways, and there are other examples, other societies. ...[I]n Egypt, for example, it's militocracy essentially. So those details are very important. ...[T]hat's why the general ideas, elite overproduction, they have to be filtered through the specific structures of different societies. ...[T]he Democratic societies have different ways that the power flows in them compared to autocratic societies... [I]f we take a step back from specific arrangements in which power flows, and... focus on more structural, more fundamental issues, then the theory works surprisingly well."

"Look at a more traditional society in which the elites are... landed nobility. ...[T]he way the wealth pump operates there is that when elite overproduction occurs... Nobles basically oppress peasants and turn on the wealth pump. So instead of economic mechanisms that transfer wealth from commoners to the Elites, in this case you have more coercion methods. ...So this is a variation on the theme ..."

"[E]ssentially in any society, however the elites are defined, whether economic, administrative, military, or ideological, they need to support a certain level of income, and so when their numbers grow, inevitably they have to extract that income from the commoners."

"You have to think dynamically... I'm talking as a scientist about entering into a crisis, and then... societies have to somehow get out of it, so in Douglass North and his colleagues, for example, they look specifically at the Glorious Revolution... the exit from about 60 years of conflict, which started... in Scottish Wars 1639 and... ended in 1690s with the new arrangements. So... when societies exit from these crises... Sometimes, by the way, they don't exit, they essentially have political fragmentation. ...Think about the Roman Empire, which has fragmented, and there was no new Roman Empire. But frequently we do have reconstitution, ...England, for example, reconstituted itself. So think about it dynamically. You have to look at the path of the crisis, and then the path out of the crisis."

"Immiseration is important, but... societies can... be pretty stable with quite a lot of immiseration. As long as the elites are united and the state is strong, the state can suppress all those peasant rebellions... All "successful" revolutions and civil wars were the result of the intraelite conflicts. Even today, if you look at Donald Trump, who is sort of the main "revolutionary" so to speak, ...he is not particularly immiserated himself, but he's channeling... the tens of millions of immiserated Americans."

"We have analyzed CrisiDB because there's plenty of data on weather proxies. ...Weather, climate worsening seems to serve often as a trigger for crisis. But the key question is whether the societies have resilience... When populations are not immiserated and elites are not overproduced the social stability and resilience is very high, and societies adjust reasonably well to climate shocks. It's really when drivers for instability have been working for a while, that's when the climate can often serve as the trigger."

"Societies adjust to climatic shocks when they are internally coherent and social cooperation is high, and therefore they can find solutions, but when such climate shocks happen when the elites are divided, essentially different factions of elites start using the climate shocks as a weapon in internecine struggle. We see this in the United States where one party denies... there is quite a large fraction of climate deniers, and so it has become part of the political infighting, rather than trying to find a collective decision, collective action that would address this issue."

"Both exogenous and endogenous. ...[H]uman societies have changed dramatically over the past couple of hundred years, and you have to take that into account. ...Many people talk about now, especially because of , the effect of technology, the automation, and of robotization, and that is certainly a force that reduces labor supply. But other things... played in the United States at the level of labor supply... first... the baby boom that created a large cohort of workers; and secondly the... massive entry of women into the labor force; and immigration. Immigration actually is much discussed but numerically it's... slightly less important than the... other demographic forces that we're talking about. ...What's exogenous, what's endogenous? It's really a matter of what our best model is, because you can endogenize things. But some things cannot be endogenized, so there are automation processes... this is a very long term process that has been happening over thousands of years... And so in my model that's clearly an exogenous mechanism. But what's the most important (to me) endogenous mechanism is the last thing that I included in the model, which is the attitudes... Think about it as institutions. ...Labor promoting institutions were installed in the United States as a result of the New Deal, and they worked very well until [the] late 70s, and then they... started to be dismantled... especially under the Reagan administration. And so I use the mininum wage as a proxy for the elite attitudes towards workers. It seems to work quite well, but we could use other proxies such as illegal anti-labor moves by firms. So that is an endogenous mechanism in theory because... essentially, ...when ...[a] crisis ...either destroys part of the elites, or frightens them so much that they install institutions that are more pro-labor, and that lasts until the collective memory of the crisis fades, and then you have... [a] recycling process... in my book I unpack these ideas."

"In my book, Ages of Discord I talk about the Progressive Period... [the] 1920s especially. Remember... the original Red Scare was in the 1920s. So when we look at the existence of the Soviet Union, established in 1920 and collapsed in 1989, this is the period when... I grew up, by the way, in the Soviet Union, and I remember how the newspapers like ' were talking about the horrors of capitalism... There are multiple lines of evidence that show that the influence from the Soviet Union... By the way, also from during the 1930s. Those were, in fact, important influences on the Roosevelt administration in... designing an equitable system. ...When the Soviet Union ... collapsed, it was misinterpreted as the triumph of neoliberal economics... and here we are essentially. ...This is an important factor. So the failure by the elites. It could be both due to internal challenges... and by the way, in the 1920s there were challenges... even earlier from [the] 1890s... from the Populist movement in the United States, and the Socialist movement in the United States. ...So those were internal. There were also external influences from competitors such as the Soviet Union."

"I claim that ... gives us a very good theoretical framework within which we can look at many different seemingly disparate trends in the United States... they suddenly start making sense... [[w:Disease of despair|[D]eaths of despair]] ...I would argue that the opioid crisis is one of the manifestations of the immiseration, and in fact... go to Case and Deaton original book (project) on deaths of despair. They make this argument very eloquently. They give a lot of data, much better than I can do, so [the] opioid crisis is part of the bundle of reasons why immiserated population (people)... results in large swaths of [the] population who are falling... and many of them take the way out by either drugs and overdosing, or... suicide, or... alcoholism... or simply become careless and die in accidents... So this is clearly, and thanks to Anne Case and Angus Deaton for their excellent work, because here we can really see... The book is excellent. They talk about social immiseration, broken families and many other things. It really is a very coherent understanding of these problems."

"The social scientist has made a career from predicting global instability. But in the new book End Times, his analysis produces nothing but banalities."

"Thank you, Peter, for... this important and timely book. ...I’ve been following your work for several years, and I discussed it in my own recent book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. The data-driven, mathematical methods you and your colleagues have developed for understanding patterns in history seem highly illuminating. In the U.S., rising economic inequality (since the 1970s) has immiserated the working class, while the number of elites (e.g., billionaires) and elite aspirants (e.g., people with law degrees) has skyrocketed. As you show... these developments align with a historical pattern seen repeatedly in complex societies, and... never seems to end well. In End Times, you lay out... what your analysis means for the United States in the 2020s. It’s not a pretty picture. ...we’re seeing the evidence of increasing polarization and political ill will everywhere."

"Turchin... a mathematical ecologist before turning to history in the mid-2000s, brings a numbers approach to his adopted subject. He was able to predict the turbulent 2020s by looking at economic and social indicators from 100 historical crises, gathered together in a database called CrisisDB. They range from medieval France to 19th-century Britain, and show that periods of instability are pretty consistently preceded by a decline in wages, the emergence of a wealth pump, and most combustibly, elite overproduction."

"I had this impression from the media that science was for old white guys, people who looked like Einstein, that it wasn’t for people like me ..."

"... CRISPR is, in fact, a bacterial immune system. It’s an ancient system that evolved in microbes to allow prevention of viral infection. Our interest in this started with that fundamental biology, asking, “How does this work?” We did a collaborative research project with Emmanuelle Charpentier, a medical microbiologist, and our work with her laboratory revealed that one of the components of this CRISPR immune system is, in fact, a protein that’s called , that can be programmed to find and cut virus DNA. We published this work back in the summer of 2012, and for me, life hasn't been the same since."

"... I just think you have to embrace your passions. You have to really go for it. People that have been less successful, in my opinion, are those that dabble in something, but then don’t really give it their all. They almost never give themselves a chance to succeed, as they back off too soon. I think for young people, I tell them go for it, find supportive mentors who will help you through the tough times, and then just keep going. Because if you have a good idea, it’s probably going to work out in some way. You may not be able to predict how, but you should just keep pursuing it."

"When I was taught biology, we learned about the structure and code of DNA, and we learned about how proteins do all the heavy lifting in cells, and RNA was treated as this dull intermediary, sort of a middle manager ... I was quite surprised that there was this young genius, Jack Szostak, at Harvard who wanted to focus a hundred percent on RNA because he thought that it was the key to understanding the origin of life."

"... it's kind of a catchy acronym. It stands for Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Oh! Don't make me say that again. ... What it means — what it symbolizes — is an immune system in bacteria that uses sequences of DNA (that come originally from viruses) ... that are transcribed into molecules of RNA that can use a search-and-destroy mechanism in cells to find and cut up virus genetic material"

"Two years ago, I was working on my laptop in an airport lounge in Newark, New Jersey, when I glanced up and saw a couple walking with their two boys. The younger boy slowly made his way on crutches, displaying the telltale signs of a hereditary disease called muscular dystrophy. Generally manifesting in childhood, the disease steadily robs those who have it of their ability to walk. Eventually, I knew, the crutches would no longer be enough. My heart skipped a beat. Most types of muscular dystrophy originate with genetic mutations that weaken key muscle proteins, and I had just come from a meeting where a cure appeared possible, using CRISPR technology to rewrite the DNA of kids just like him. Imagining how the technology I’d helped create could change this boy’s life, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Beyond hope and wonder, I was filled with a sense of fierce urgency to expand CRISPR’s impact to the people around the world who need it most."

"Phylogeography is a field of study concerned with the principles and processes governing the geographic distribution of genealogical lineages, especially those within and among closely related species. As the word implies, phylogeography deals with historical, phylogenetic components of the spatial distributions of gene lineages. In other words, time and space are the jointly considered axes of phylogeography onto which (ideally) are mapped particular gene genealogies of interest ... The analysis and interpretation of lineage distributions usually require extensive input from molecular genetics, population genetics, ethology, demography, phylogenetic biology, paleontology, geology, and historical geography. Thus, phylogeography is an integrative endeavor that lies at an important crossroads of diverse microevolutionary and macroevolutionary disciplines ..."

"Recent genome-sequencing efforts have confirmed that traditional "good-citizen" genes (those that encode functional RNA and protein molecules of obvious benefit to the organism) constitute only a small fraction of the genomic populace in humans and other multicellular creatures. The rest of the DNA sequence includes an astonishing collection of noncoding regions, regulatory modules, deadbeat pseudogenes, legions of repetitive elements, and hosts of oft-shifty, self-interested nomads, renegades, and immigrants. To help visualize functional operations in such intracellular genomic societies and to better encapsulate the evolutionary origins of complex genomes, new and evocative metaphors may be both entertaining and research-stimulating."

"An example of how this is the best of times for evolutionary biology is provided by the recent elucidation of a draft sequence of all 3-billion-plus nucleotide pairs in the human genome et al. 2001, et al. 2001). ... Some prognosticators believe that the application of recombinant DNA methods to gene therapy and gene replacement (the repair or replacement of defective genes in the body) soon may lead to a revolution in the history of medicine comparable to the introductions of sanitation, anesthesia, and antibiotics and vaccines. If the new recombinant gene technologies live up to their early billing, we or our children might see a day when gene therapy can alleviate sickle cell anemia, heart disease, cancer, or various other human genetic disorders. Just as we may marvel at our forebears' fortitude in the dark ages before the advent of our modern medicine, our grandchildren may look back with marvel at our fortitude in the era preceding the wide availability of gene therapies. Nonetheless, the technical hurdles remain daunting. … … Ecologists and natural historians are painfully aware that the subject matter of their devotion—biodiversity—is under assault worldwide as the continents fill with people. The collective weight of human activities is leading to the disappearance of wilderness. Atmosphere and oceans are being polluted, marine fisheries are collapsing worldwide, and wetlands and freshwater aquifers have shrunk dramatically. In short, Earth's renewable and nonrenewable resources are being tragically squandered. In the Amazon Basin, for example, which is famous for its rich biota, slash-and-burn fires are so numerous that their light is visible to astronauts in the space shuttle. Some of these astronauts have felt moved to speak in a deeply spiritual tenor about the beauty of the “blue planet” and to bemoan how we are despoiling this special, fragile place."

"Scientists now routinely utilize the genetic information in biological macromolecules—proteins and DNA—to address numerous aspects of the behaviors, life histories, and evolutionary relationships of organisms. When used to best effect, molecular data are integrated with information from such fields as , , , , and paleontology. These time-honored biological disciplines remain highly active today, but each has been enriched if not rejuvenated by contact with the relatively young but burgeoning field of molecular evolution."

"The noticeable genetic divergence of India from other regions is coupled with low levels of genetic divergence across the subgroups within India."

"A very recent survey of natural s has pointed out that more than 200 species of higher plants comprise the study, that they are widely distributed in the plant kingdom (146 genera in more than 50 families) and that the active principles are known for only about 45 species (Schultes and 1980) , Harvard Univ. 28 (186–190). This survey attributes the lack of chemical knowledge of these plants to two causes: (i) the lack of good animal models which the chemist can utilize in monitoring his isolation work; and (ii) the paucity of field work of scientific trustworthiness in fast disappearing aboriginal societies. The survey ends with the statement that the “… Plant kingdom remains a fertile and almost virgin territory for those interested in the discovery of new psychoactive drugs, not to mention other types of biologically active compounds waiting in silent hiding.”"

"There have long been two strongly divergent poles in our evaluation of ethnobotany. Some students are carried away in an enthusiastic assumption that native peoples everywhere have a special intuition in unlocking the secrets of the Plant Kingdom. Others cast aside or at least denigrate all aboriginal folk lore as not worthy of serious scientific consideration. Both viewpoints, of course, are unwarranted. The accomplishments of native peoples in understanding plant properties so thoroughly must be simply a result of a long and intimate association with their s and their utter dependence on them. Consequently — and especially since so much aboriginal knowledge is based on experimentation — it warrants careful and criticai attention on the part of modern scientific efforts. It behooves us to take advantage now of this extensive knowledge that still exists in many parts of the world, lest it be lost with the inexorable onrush of civilization and the resulting extinction of one primitive culture after another. This experimentally acquired knowledge may not much longer be avaílable."

"has given the world some of its most important plants: the Pará Rubber-tree ('), the Pineapple ('), Cacao ('), the Tapioca Plant or Cassava ('), Coca (' var. ipadu), the Brazil-nut Tree ('), paradise nuts (' spp.), the Curare liana ('), and yet others. Each of these species has local s and wild relatives that may be of inestimable value in future genetic projects that may be oriented towareds various aspects of improving cultivated forms for greater yield, disease resistance, adaptation to different soil and climatic conditions, and sundry other characteristics."

"... The two problems which face every organism are those of maintaining its own life and continuing its race. Its youth is devoted entirely to satisfying its individual needs for food and safety; its adult life is devoted to the race, but the necessities of the individual are still satisfied though they may be secured in an entirely different way. The immature life of is aquatic, and to it all adjustments concerned with food or safety are exclusively confined. The mature or adult life is aerial. It is solely devoted to reproduction. There is no provision for food or for other means of lengthening its life. It gives an opportunity for studying ways of getting a living which have been completely isolated from ways of reproducing."

"At Kartabo the waters of the meet those of the and soon join the great lake-like flowing north through the low lying country of British Guiana until it runs into the sea at . These rivers are hedged in by the jungle whose undergrowth has invaded the border waters in a persistent attempt to gain more territory. roots swing so far out from the banks that fish swim in and out among them. Moccamoccas, the giant s, have grown out still further. Their clublike stems standing in close rank provide on gigantic scale the kind of animal shelter furnished in more modest form by our own and s. Many slow flowing creeks feed into these larger streams but their mouths are hidden by creepers, tangles of mangrove, and prickly shrubs, and if the currents are gentle enough they are choked by lush growths of '. … Even at Kartabo Point the daily tides are insistent reminders of the ocean forty miles away.The low tide lay bare stretches of muck and ooze, silt and silty sand ... the likely dwelling place of the burrowing and crawling Mayflies ..."

"Different waters hold their own special communities; the dainty glen stream shelters companies of in its swift riffles; pond shallows and meadow brooks are the homes of lurking s; and wayside puddles are populous with s and s. In all these places living things must contend with winter cold and summer drought, with storms and flood waters. In winter the pond populations drop to the bottom, frogs and turtles dig under mud and broken plants, s hide under banks to come out with every warm spell, and fresh water sponges are packed in tough covered capsules. In summer when its own pool dries up the flies to some other pond but many burrow into the mud bottom and endure the drought as best they can."

"Among the s and the water weeds of the shallows, lurk es, s, mud minnows, and young . All of these forage upon snails, crustaceans, and insect larvæ, especially the tempting mayfly nymphs which they find there. s float with their heads just out of water; of all frogs these belong most thoroughly in the pond. Equally at home in it are the painted turtles, and the spotted turtles often found with them … In May and June stumps and floating logs usually carry a load of one kind or the other. They forage in the shallows taking a heavy toll of tadpoles, snails, dragonflies—a miscellaneous bill-of-fare which they always eat under water. Snapping turtles frequent these waters also, catching anything within reach of the lightning-quick thrusts of their heads—fishes, tadpoles, frogs, or crayfishes, as well as the smaller game of insects and worms."

"s are transparent microscopic animals which live in fresh or salt water. They abound in the surface waters of great lakes, and swarm through the shallows of ponds and bogs; there is scarcely any stand of soft water, whether transient puddle or rain-barrel or fountain-basin, where rotifers can not be found. They live in ponds and lakes, providing a large part of the food for small s and worms and are thus indirectly a large source of food for fishes."

"es posses much more beauty and interest than their reputation credits them with. Most of them are marked with concealing colors and patterns, browns, greens, and blacks, picturing upon them the broken shadows and water-soaked leaves of their natural background and hiding them in it. They are sensitive to the slightest vibration of the water, to shadows passing over them, and to small changes in the water around them. Their whole set up is one of exquisite efficiency for their mode of living. … The external features most essential to a leech are the strong muscular suckers at each end of its body and the sucking mouth which which may or may not be armed with jaws … Leeches are segmented worms like bristleworms and common earthworms and belong to the Phylum '."

"As the spawning season approaches, fishes move toward the shores of ponds and lakes or upstream in the creeks. Some of them, such as perch and sunfish, only swim in among nearby weeds or protecting stones. The journeys vary from such short ones to the famous migrations of river salmon, extending over hundreds of miles; but they all end at spawning grounds or nesting sites. During this time color differences between male and female appear or become more marked."

"In most cold winters there is plenty of snow, and this is the greatest aid to wintering insects."

"Crickets.—Crickets, like grasshoppers, vary in their winter habits. Some live over the winter in the ; others hibernate as s. Nymphs of the , Gryllus assimilis pennsylvanicus (which has a short ), hibernate beneath stones ..."

"… Wherever animals live, in fresh water, salt water, or on land, their body fluids are similar; all are salty. In marine invertebrates, whether es or s, the body fluids are practically filtered sea water."

"The s () of s repeat the essentials of kidney form and function, tubules closely associated with blood and body fluid, each one a guardian of the content of the blood. There are two kidneys in nearly every segment of the earthworm ..."

". The power to regrow lost parts permits to survive and even to multiply after injury. Three planarians may live and flourish because one was cut into three pieces. All ns are aquatic. A considerable number live in fresh water and a few on moist soil. Most of them are marine."

"Feeding. The majority of ns are carnivorous. The smaller fresh-water ones feed upon s and worms that are nearly microscopic, the larger one on s, s and , often on their softened remains. Even in quiet waters they can detect juicy meat two or three feet away."

"... s feed upon microorganism from the muck and water of the bottom and in turn are consumed by es, s and mankind."

"... Darwin ... became the official naturalist on the five-year voyage of the "" (1831–1836) ... ... He also read the essay in which Malthus told of the human populations that became too large for the space available to them (1838). This suggested a plan. Some organism must be winnowed out by their natural surroundings; thus, others would be benefited. There would be natural selection."

"... Although she carried on most of her research in the northeastern United States, she spent the summer of 1926 working in at the Tropical Laboratory in Kartabo. Although limnology was her special subject—on which wrote a useful book, Field Book of Ponds and Streams (1930)—Morgan was also interested in many other facets of zoology, particularly hibernating animals. Her Field Book of Animals in Winter (1939) reflected this interest. In 1949 the ' made it into an educational film. She was also interested in conservation and ecology.."

"Morgan's views concerning animal and human interdependence place her among a select group of strong conservationists, of whom the most renowned is probably Rachel Carson ..."

"struggle to decide how many animals to save. In this article, I outline 18 approaches to setting population target levels (PTLs) for animals, with rules of thumb and analytical recommendations for each approach. , the most common target level, are necessary but not sufficient for most efforts, given the range of values that bear on conservation. Reference s, either extant or historical, are key for setting practical target levels. Setting PTLs sufficient for conserved populations to be animals in all respects (including functional, social, landscape, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects) is a critical consensus point. In many cases densities as well as overall population size will need to be specified. I suggest a four-tiered system of setting incrementally higher population target levels such that conservation provides first for demographic sustainability, then ecological integrity, then , and finally , based on times when human beings had less impact on the planet than we do today."

"On a hot, fair day, the twelfth of September, 1609, and a small crew of Dutch and English sailors rode the flood tide up a great , past a long, wooded island at latitude 40º 48' north, on the edge of the North American continent. Locally the island was called Mannahatta, or "Island of Many Hills." … Mannahatta had more per acre than , more native plant species per acre than , and more birds than the . Mannahatta housed wolves, s, s, s, , and s; whales, s, , and the occasional visited its harbor. Millions of birds of more than a hundred and fifty different species flew over the island annually on transcontinental s; millions of fish—, , , , and –swam past the island up the and in its streams during annual rites of spring."

"I came to the Bronx as an ecologist to work for the (the 's parent organization), a New York City cultivation institution with a century-long dedication to and s around the world. My task was to bring technical aspects of modern geography into its global mission to save tigers, elephants, whales, s, and other ... More than most disciplines, ecology thrives on complexity, and ecology in the service of conservation (a subdiscipline called ) pulls one rapidly into the domains of economics, society, and politics."

"When wanders through , he's able to look beyond the half-million cubic yards of soil hauled in by its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and , to fill in what was mostly a swampy bog surrounded by and . He can trace the shoreline of the long, narrow lake that lay along what is now , north of the , with its tidal outlets that meandered through salt marsh to the . From the west, he can see a pair of streams entering the lake that drained the slope of 's major ridgeline, a deer mountain lion trail known today as ."

"Sustainable urban life is technologically achievable, and most important, highly desirable. For example, food waste can easily be converted back into energy employing clean state-of-the-art incineration technologies, and wastewater can be converted back into drinking water. For the first time in history, an entire city can choose to become the functional urban equivalent of a natural ecosystem. We could even generate energy from incinerating human feces if we so desired. We have the ability to create a "cradle to cradle" waste-free economy. All that is needed is the political will to do so. Once we begin the process, cities will be able to live within their means without further damaging the environment."

"Time Line for 1937 – Discovered in Uganda in the . Mistaken at first for 1951 – Israeli scientists determine the conditions for transmission from the perspective of mosquitoes. Temperature vrs. 1973 – Biggest outbreak in history in South Africa – 3,000 people sick. Hot and dry conditions followed by heavy rains 1999 – West Nile Virus first introduced in USA. Hottest, driest summer on record. 2010 – West Nile virus now an endemic infectious disease of and people. Yearly outbreaks common. All dependent on hot, dry weather, followed by a rain event"

"Ever since we became a species, some 200,000 years ago, s have been responsible for untold amounts of human suffering and countless deaths. For instance, some experts believe that Homo sapi­ens almost became extinct as the result of epidemics caused by malaria that coincided with a time when our numbers were perhaps as low as 400,000 individuals. The worst part is that this killer is still with us. In just over the past one hundred years, as many people have died from worldwide as now live in the United States. While the number of people dying from this one parasite is high, consider the fact that ma­laria in all its forms (there are four) infects some two billion individuals each year. This reduces the mortality rate to around 1 percent, making this group of infectious agents some of the most successful parasites on the planet."

"mainly differ amongst each other in terms of the technological methods used to grow edible plants indoors. 1. The first one, , consists of growing plants on a neutral and inert substrate (e.g. sand, clay, and rock material), which is regularly irrigated by a liquid fortified with minerals and nutrients that are necessary to sustain plant growth. Hydroponic systems use 60-70% less water than traditional outdoor agriculture. They are widely employed by hundreds of thousands of commercial greenhouses and vertical farms throughout the world. 2. The second process of vertical farming is , through which plants are grown without the use of any soil (or soil replacement): their roots, hanging down in the air inside a closed container, are exposed to a fine mist of nutrient-laden water, regularly sprayed through a nozzle. While this is a relatively new method for growing edible plants – it was first developed in 1983 – it is increasingly employed by commercial vertical farms such as and Tower Garden in the US. 3. Finally, a hybrid method, , integrates fish production into the hydroponic growing scheme. More precisely, it uses fish waste as a nutrient source for the plants after treatment, operating as a closed loop ecosystem for indoor farming. However, this system’s complexity and high cost hinder its widespread use. The former two methods are the most common forms of ."

"... People tire of being taken advantage of. Some commit their lives to reforming city politics, and others work on technological solutions that benefit both humankind and . The latter efforts have led to (1) the development of efficient, affordable renewable-energy strategies; (2) carbon-capturing, recyclable construction materials with low s; (3) cost-effective atmospheric water-harvesting methods; and (4) productive vertical farms situated within the city. issues are now front and center on many city council agendas. I call these four applications of technology the four pillars of sustainability."

"... if you look at the way cities behave, they are parasitic on landscape. In every aspect of whatever they need, they get it from some other place ..."

"Trees sequester carbon, harvest water, produce food, and convert sunlight into energy. Those are the four characteristics I would love a city to have. The resiliency of forests is to be emulated. And that’s the reason why I picked forests as my biomimic. I want my city to be as resilient as Earth’s s. The main reason why is occurring is to make room for farms. Before there was farming, which was about ten to twelve thousand years ago, we had six trillion trees. We now have three trillion trees. We’ve cut down half of the Earth’s ability to capture carbon. We’re not going to replace all of that with new trees. But if we got back up to five trillion trees, let’s say, simply by leaving the remaining forests alone and letting them repopulate and selectively harvesting, the Earth’s temperature rise would begin to slow down. And, once you’ve slowed it down, that gives you time to reflect and to prepare for these changes that are not going to go away. Replacing three trillion trees by planting them—that’s not going to work. We’ll never be able to do that. So we have to let nature do that part. And, in order to do that, we have to return a lot of farmland back to what it used to be, which was forests."

"Despommier's writing is conversational and fun. He quotes Mark Twain and shares “inside” stories (did you know, for example, that once contracted at a restaurant in New York and later banked a hefty sum for his tsouris?). Despommier also pays homage to early giants of parasitology and the late , a superb spinner of parasite tales known to many members."

"Around this world and to this very day, among experts and novices alike, say the word “evolution” and most people hear the word “genes.” (P. 19)"

"...[A] new breed of philosopher was coming close to declaring that nothing in philosophy makes sense except in the light of evolution. (P. 26)"

"Science is often associated with complicated instruments and questions so specialized that a PhD is required even to become interested. (P. 31)"

"I was offended by the New Atheist movement, which included the public intellectuals Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great, 2007), in addition to Dawkins and Dennett with their evolutionary credentials. In part I was offended by the poor scholarship of the books, which meant that Dawkins and Dennett were falsely trading on their academic reputations. The fact that the books were written for the general reader wasn’t an excuse. The New Atheists clearly began with animosity toward religion and constructed their arguments to support their predetermined conclusion. (P. 33)"

"Building a scientific edifice is a bit like building a cathedral, stone by stone. Shaping each stone—each single study—is hard work but immensely satisfying, especially knowing that it will be durable. (P. 38)"

"...I still remember those girls and who didn't love math, uh, the way I did. And I mean, oh my gosh, think what they were missing. I know I always felt, you know, solving math problems was a little bit like eating candy. There was something about it. It was so rewarding. It was just such a pleasure to do it. And I thought, oh, once they see this, they're going to enjoy it too."

"...And it was so ridiculous. And this was this thing about this teaching of a class and I've been told that I couldn't teach undergraduates because MIT students didn't believe scientific information spoken by a woman. And so I'd said, well, of course, everyone knows that. I had accepted it as normal because as soon as somebody said it, I realized, of course, it's true. I was able to see that women were so under-respected that students couldn't respect them enough. And so they were afraid to put an important course into the hands of a woman for fear the students would not be able to respect them."

"Those who are deeply religious may look at evolution not as a challenge, but as a true demonstration of the power of the Creator's ingenuity. The vastness and implications of evolution cannot simplify the sense of admiration for a creator who was able to set such a mechanism in motion. Perhaps the Great Architect of the Universe didn't bother to write every single DNA base and acid in the human genome, but that doesn't detract from his incredible intelligence."

"Uncharacteristically for biology, s were very much part of the formative studies of that were designed and executed by luminaries such as , , and . Of these, Delbrück was a physicist, and papers from the early days of phage biology (certainly those with his name attached) reveal quantitative thinking that helped build intuition regarding the dynamics that could be seen at scales far larger than those at which the actual events were unfolding. These early studies provided the foundation for subsequent diversification of the study of phage: the basic concepts of what happens subsequent to infection, experimental protocols for inferring quantitative rates from time-series data, and methods for interpreting and disentangling alternative possibilities underlying the as-yet-unseen actions taking place at micro- and nanoscale (Delbrück 1946; Lwoff 1953)."

"Quantitative reasoning alone is critical but not sufficient. If it were, then the paradigm of mathematics and physics classes would seem to be a viable path forward for a parallel pedagogical track in the . That is to say, take a set of established equations, analyze them, explore the logical consequences of the relationships, and use their solutions as a proxy for the behavior of the natural world. However, unlike the constitutive equations of physics, a mathematical set of equations that describes a living system is not necessarily a hallowed object—not yet, at least. Models of living systems should not be put on pedestals nor conflated as substitutes for measurement. Models, mechanisms, and their predictions must engage with evidence taken from living systems in an iterative fashion—with far greater frequency than in certain branches of physics."

". The word may seem an unlikely start for a book meant to explain the . Yet, over time, we have learned that nearly everyone who was infected with survived—roughly 99% (or more). Not only did the vast majority survive, but many—if not half of those infected—had such mild infections that they never knew they had the virus. They were asymptomatic."

"We have to follow the . The data doesn't follow our narrative."

"s are nothing new. In fact, fossil evidence shows us that jellyfish have been blooming for hundreds of millions of years. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, it became fashionable for naturalists to report all sorts of odd and unusual events from the natural world. The early issues of the and others like it are full of such interesting tidbits. One such report described ' as so abundant in , Germany, that an oar pushed down between the jellyfish remained standing upright ( 1880). Today, just about any bay or harbor has Aurelia shoals so dense that one may wonder whether there is actually enough water between each jellyfish for it to obtain enough oxygen to survive."

"Jellyfish as a group holds some astonishing records. The world's most venomous animal is a jellyfish, the Australian Deadly Box jelly-fish (', page 50). The largest invertebrate discovered in the twentieth century is a jellyfish, the so-called Black Sea Nettle (', page 114)—thought it is practically a toy compared to the lion's mane jellies of the North Atlanta (' spp., page 52), which can reach three meters (ten feet) across the body and drag tentacles nearly 30 meters (100 feet) long. One jellyfish helped scientists win the Nobel Prize (page 198). Another grows ten percent of its body length per hour (page 208). And the world's first known case of true biological immortality was discovered in the diminutive and aptly named Immortal Jellyfish (', page 74)."

"Imagine one of Australia’s foremost jellyfish specialists, a robust scientist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of jellyfish taxonomy and a deep understanding of their place in the . Now make them enthusiastic, unashamedly and female. This is Lisa-Ann Gershwin. Dr Gershwin this year was named one of The Science Show's Top 100 Australian Scientists, along with greats such as Sir FRS, Sir FRS, and Professor FRS. Her road to science has not been a smooth one though. ... Lisa-Ann describes her neurodivergence as central to her science and who she is. While it has been a source of joy as she has been able to immerse herself in the details of jellyfish taxonomy and ecology, it has also come with difficulties."

"Science is systematic organisation of knowledge about the universe on the basis of explanatory hypotheses which are genuinely testable. Science advances by developing gradually more comprehensive theories; that is, by formulating theories of greater generality which can account for observational statements and hypotheses which appear as prima facie unrelated."

"So that's the beautiful thing about astrobiology. [Proving the existence of life] is like the ultimate episode of CSI. You're putting together the biggest forensic case of your life to prove who the killer is, and you’ve got to be able to go to the jury and prove beyond reasonable doubt that you know who's done it."

"Be true to yourself, don’t compromise yourself, ask a lot of questions... that’s literally our job!."

"A very important aspect of being human is to have faith and to have belief, but the science is absolutely essential for our wellbeing as a species, so we should be able to reconcile the two."

"Unfortunately, we as scientists have not done a good job at explaining what evolution is and decoupling it from atheism—it’s really not about religion at all, it’s about the natural world."

"Any population that has been abused is going to have some issues, and you have to address those issues head-on. Establish rapport, build the trust, and then maintain it, because it can relapse into feelings of oppression very easily."

"It is possible to convey the fundamental aspects of all the science that we do in a cultural context that’s relevant for the people. That’s probably the most important thing that we do in science—to make it real and important for the people that we’re speaking to."

"When I talk about substructure to Muslims who have read the Quran, I try to relate it to one of the passages that essentially says (with “we” meaning “God”), “We have created you into nations and tribes so that you’ll get to know each other, not so you’ll despise each other, and the best among you is the best with God consciousness.” It fits into the scientific rationale for my work, and there’s an immediate link. That’s what we in the science community have to build with nonscientists; you have to build these links so that they will embrace the science and use it appropriately."

"Computational biology is the art of developing and applying computational methods to answer questions in biology, such as studying how proteins fold, identifying genes that are associated with diseases, or inferring human population histories from genetic data."

"I have interests in both the development of computational methods and in answering specific biology questions, primarily related to the function of RNA, a molecule central to the function of cells."

"While genome sequencing has obviously been useful in revealing the sequences that are involved in coding various aspects of the molecular biology of the cell, it has had a secondary impact that is less obvious at first glance."

"The low cost and high throughput (the ability to process large volumes of material) of genome sequencing allowed for a more "big-data" approach to biology, so that experiments that previously could only be applied to individual genes could suddenly be applied in parallel to all of the genes in the genome."

"A result of the scale of these new experiments is the emergence of very large data sets in biology whose interpretation demands the application of state-of-the-art computer science methods."

"The problems require interdisciplinary dexterity and involve not only management of large data sets but also the development of novel abstract frameworks for understanding their structure."

"Every microbial species discovered is a new piece of the puzzle in understanding life's complexity"

"Microbes have been shaping the course of human history, from the development of agriculture to the prevention and treatment of diseases."

"The central dogma of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein."

"The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps."

"The purpose of science is to develop a shared understanding of the natural world."

"Microbiology offers an understanding of the hidden world of microbes that is essential for understanding our own biology."

"Microbes don't just cause diseases, they also play critical roles in the health of our planet."

"Microbes are the unsung heroes of life on Earth."

"We must recognize the interconnectedness of all living things if we are to truly understand life."

"The biodiversity of microbes far exceeds that of all other organisms combined."

"Microbes have been shaping the course of evolution since the beginning of life."

"Microbes provide the foundation for all life on Earth."

"Through the study of microbes, we can unlock the secrets of life itself."

"The ability of microbes to adapt and evolve is unparalleled in the natural world."

"Microbes are the ultimate survivors, capable of thriving in some of the most extreme environments on Earth."

"Microbes hold the key to solving many of our pressing global challenges, from disease eradication to sustainable agriculture."

"The study of microbes is a never-ending journey of discovery."

"Microbiology is a field where curiosity meets application, paving the way for meaningful scientific advancements."

"By studying microbes, we can gain insights into our own biological processes and potentially unlock new therapeutic approaches."

"Microbial communities are like intricate ecosystems, with each member playing a unique role."

"Microbes are the true masters of adaptation, constantly evolving to overcome challenges."

"From the most remote landscapes to the depths of the ocean, microbes are everywhere."

"From the tiniest single-celled organisms to complex microbial communities, microbes hold immense scientific value and hold the secrets to the origins of life."

"The only way that I will be in charge of this [lab] group is if you let me run it my way and there’s no interference from anyone."

"I’ve made many mistakes in my time,” she told her lab team. I expect you to make mistakes. I expect you to tell me what those mistakes are so we can correct them."

"s have contested for possession of the waters much as the have contended for supremacy on land, until it may be said that the dominant forage crop of our lakes, ponds, and s is to be found among the pondweeds, the s. Variety in form, adaptability to , and diversity in range have all contributed their share in giving prominence in this group and in furthering a natural resource whose propagation and control are vital factors in the economic relations of the life of inland waters."

"I had to be all things to all fishes."

"Collections of fish were made at weekly intervals and, if not examined at once in their fresh condition, were kept in an - preserving fluid until needed. In examining the food the method of (1918) was employed, that is, the food content of the digestive tract was pressed out upon a , moistened, and examined under the dissecting and compound microscopes."

"... ', one of the largest of the , was produced in enormous quantity by natural means. The blue-green alga, , contributed directly to its support and proved to be the most desirable food of a heavy, natural culture of Daphnia pulex. The author's first observation of this association in the pond occurred on June 21, 1918. At this time a "bloom" of the Aphanizomenon was approaching it maximum. It was so abundant that the water appeared blue-green and oily. A few hand strokes of the net would bring up a of it in concentrated form."

"affects cabbage cultivars grown for , storage, and fresh market. The disease is caused by the '. This fungus can cause serious losses in the field, in storage, and under transit and market conditions. S. sclerotiorum is widely distributed in relatively cool and moist areas throughout the world. The fungus has a wide host range and is known to attack over 360 species of plants. In the family alone, it has been recorded on 18 genera and 32 species. In the fungus is capable of infecting many types of vegetables and is particularly serious on s. It also infects weeds such as , , and wild clover.."

"Tomato anthracnose is a serious disease of processing es caused by the ' and is a threat to tomatoes grown in . To minimize the mold count in processed tomato products, processors impose a strict limit on the amount of anthracnose acceptable on the raw product. ... The fungus survives the winter as seedlike structures called and as threadlike strands called e in infested tomato debris. In late spring the lower leaves and fruit may become infected by germinating sclerotia and spores in the soil debris. Infections of the lower leaves of tomato plants are important sources of spores for secondary infections throughout the growing season. Senescent leaves with early s and leaves with injury are especially important spore sources because the fungus can colonize C. coccodes and produce new spores in these wounded areas."

"Passing by the mountain village of —a quaint, artsy town known for its Saturday tourist markets—the changed abruptly to open . Stately rainforest trees were replaced by s, s and s, with a ground layer of punctuated by large, oddly shaped . s and s, their flowers shaped like bottle-brushes, grew in dense clumps along a few meandering creeks."

"In the , alters forest–climate interactions in diverse ways. On a local scale (less than 1 ), elevated desiccation and wind disturbance near fragment margins lead to sharply increased tree mortality, thus altering dynamics, composition, dynamics and . Fragmented forests are also highly vulnerable to edge–related fires, especially in regions with periodic droughts or strong dry seasons. At landscape to regional scales (10–1000 km), habitat fragmentation may have complex effects on forest–climate interactions, with important consequences for atmospheric circulation, water cycling and precipitation. Positive feedbacks among , regional climate change and fire could pose a serious threat for some tropical forests, but the details of such interactions are poorly understood."

"Each year—as a result of , automobiles, , , and tropical —humankind spews some 8 billion tons of , , and other carbon-based pollutants into the atmosphere. The net effect, as we all know, has been an alarming rise in air pollutants—particularly carbon dioxide, which has increased by more than a third, from 280 to 380 parts per million (ppm), since the onset of the industrial era. Equally distressing is that these emissions are accelerating, because countries like the United States have failed to rein their burgeoning emissions and because rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil are increasingly adopting the energy-consumptive lifestyles of industrial nations. From 1800 to 1960, for example, the average annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations was just 0.2 ppm, but this jumped to 1.4 ppm from 1960 to 2000 and has since risen to 2.3 ppm."

"s are the most biologically diverse and ecologically complex of terrestrial ecosystems, and are disappearing at alarming rates. It has long been suggested that rapid forest loss and degradation in the , if unabated, could ultimately precipitate a wave of species extinctions, perhaps comparable to mass extinction events in the geological history of the Earth. However, a vigorous debate has erupted following a study by Wright and Muller-Landau that challenges the notion of large-scale tropical extinctions, at least over the next century."

"Humankind has dramatically transformed much of the Earth’s surface and its natural ecosystems. This process is not new—it has been ongoing for millennia—but it has accelerated sharply over the last two centuries, and especially in the last several decades. Today, the loss and degradation of natural history can be likened to a war of attrition. Many natural ecosystems are being progressively razed, bulldozed, and felled by axes or chainsaws, until only small scraps of their original extent survive. Forests have been hit especially hard: the global area of forests have been reduced by roughly half over the past three centuries. Twenty-five nations have lost virtually all of their forest cover, and another 29 more than nine-tenths of their forest ( 2005)."

"Effects from small plastic debris and sorbed chemicals may not be additive and future research is needed to identify the nature of the risks from this combination of s. It is likely that the risk to an will vary by type and size of plastic debris, which may affect its ability to concentrate chemicals from ambient water ... and in s … Risks may also vary over space and time due to the concentration of hazardous chemicals available for ... and the length of time the debris has interacted with ambient water and sunlight. of plastic increases surface area, and may enable greater accumulation of hazardous chemicals. Such complexity begs the initiation of research programs and risk assessments that are ecologically relevant ..."

"For decades we have learned about the physical hazards associated with in the , but recently we are beginning to realize the s. Assessing hazards associated with plastic in is not simple, and requires knowledge regarding s that may be exposed, the exposure concentrations, the types of s comprising the debris, the length of time the debris was present in the aquatic environment (affecting the size, shape and fouling) and the locations and transport of the debris during that time period. Marine plastic debris is associated with a ‘cocktail of chemicals’, including chemicals added or produced during manufacturing and those present in the marine environment that accumulate onto the debris from surrounding . This raises concerns regarding: (i) the complex mixture of chemical substances associated with marine plastic debris, (ii) the environmental fate of these chemicals to and from plastics in our oceans and (iii) how this mixture affects wildlife, as hundreds of species ingest this material in nature."

"Over the last decade, it has become indisputable that small plastic debris contaminates s and wildlife globally. Of concern is that this material, which is ingested by hundreds of species across multiple trophic levels, is associated with a complex mixture of hazardous chemicals. Models, laboratory exposures, and field studies have all demonstrated that plastic debris can act as a source for hazardous chemicals to bioaccumulate in animals. This has been demonstrated with several plastic types, including , (PVC), , and , and for several different organic chemicals, including s, s, , , and . What remains less certain is the ecological importance of this transfer, i.e., the relative contribution of plastic as a source of chemicals to wildlife relative to other sources. ... Further research is warranted to better understand the mechanisms by which plastic-associated contaminants transfer to organisms and if the chemicals are biomagnified in higher trophic level animals leading to ecological consequences or even human health effects via consumption of contaminated seafood."

"Research on (small particles of plastic <5 in size) has long focused on their largest sink: the ocean. More recently, however, researchers have expanded their focus to include freshwater and terrestrial environments. This is a welcome development, given that an estimated 80% of microplastic pollution in the ocean comes from land ... and that rivers are one of the dominant pathways for microplastics to reach the oceans ... Like other , such as s (PCBs), microplastics are now recognized as being distributed across the globe. Detailed understanding of the fate and impacts of this ubiquitous environmental contaminant will thus require a concerted effort among scientists with expertise beyond the marine sciences."

"The impact of , , and, to a lesser extent , on the structure of the of large is explored in one fossil and four Recent communities. Two aspects are emphasized: (1) the number of species within each guild and (2) the extent of locomotor convergence as inferred from morphology among the constituent species. Locomotor behavior reflects habitat choice, hunting mode, and escape strategy, all of which appear to be important avenues of adaptive divergence among coexisting predators."

"Despite the repeated tendency of s to evolve s for hypercarnivory, a canid has yet to appear that is completely catlike, that is, without any post- s. This possible constraint on morphological evolution in canids is argued to have resulted, paradoxically, in increased flexibility over evolutionary time and a great potential for rapid diversification and clade survivorship. Finally, it is suggested that the iterative pattern of specialization of the lower molars for meat-slicing that is seen in all families of carnivores, past and present, is probably a result of intraspecific competition for food, perhaps among s. This intraspecific selective force is countered by competition among species, since there are limits on the number of hypercarnivorous species within a single community."

"Eaton (1979) was one of the first biologists to promote the importance of among coexisting large s. In his review, he focused on interspecific interactions over carcasses and noted that larger carnivores tended to displace smaller ones from carcasses and that grouping behavior could reverse this relationship. He noted as well that interspecific battles over kills occurred and often resulted in injury or death to one of the participants. In a study of adaptations to coexistence among carnivores, Van Valkenburg (1985) pointed out the additional pressure of interspecific predation among carnivores, noting that both juveniles and adults are killed but not always eaten."

"The transition to that launched the evolution of animals from marks one of the most pivotal, and poorly understood, events in . Advances in and , and particularly the study of s, are yielding new insights into the biology of the unicellular progenitors of animals. and gene families critical for animal development (including s and s) evolved in protozoa before the origin of animals. Innovations in and expansions of certain gene families may have allowed the integration of cell behavior during the earliest experiments with multicellularity. The protozoan perspective on animal origins promises to provide a valuable window into the distant past and into the cellular bases of animal development."

"s have a secret. While our research is motivated by a desire to reconstruct , it can also provide novel insights into fundamental cellular mechanisms in modern s. Studies of evolution reveal how the cell's component parts were “assembled” over time, how and why cells are vulnerable to disease and death, the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for fundamental cellular processes, and those mechanisms that distinguish the and of different lineages of organisms from each other. Studies of “evolutionary cell biology” promise to deepen our understanding of how cells function."

"... in the closing line of Darwin's ', he remarked on 'endless forms most beautiful', and he was referring to the incredible diversity of s ... much of his research and thinking had to with trying to understand: How do we get this diversity of s? And, there's been a great deal of progress in this regard, largely from the work of s, s, and s working together to try to understand what are molecular mechanistic underpinnings of the diversification of animal body plans. ... Animals are united by their shared ancestry. They all share a common ancestor … And, in fact, we know relatively little about the nature of that organism."

"and their were discovered in 1977. While the hot-water springs were predicted to occur at s, no one expected to find them colonized by exotic invertebrate faunas. Accustomed to a view of the deep sea as a food-limited environment, the puzzle of how lush communities could be maintained provoked biologists into a flurry of research activity. ... As field programs multiplied and more vent communities were discovered, biogeographic patterns in the distribution of faunas became apparent and ecological issues of requirements, , and began to be addressed. associated with diverse settings, from and s to . Massive bacterial blooms triggered by the release of nutrients during a volcanic eruption, rapid colonization of new vents by invertebrates, and burial of extant vent communities by lava flows demonstrate the dynamic nature of hydrothermal systems. Perhaps the most provocative consequence of the discovery of seafloor hydrothermal vents is the ."

"You can go for hundreds of meters along the and see nothing. But then you’ll get to a and it will be a garden of exotic creatures. The vents are like the . The seawater percolates down through cracks caused by earthquakes, and then it comes up through these underwater chimneys. There are lots of ores there like copper, gold, silver, and s. There’s so much life there, and it’s very different from what we’re used to seeing. Whenever scientists go down, we almost always find new creatures."

"in the late 1970s led to the discovery of at s. More recently, sulphide deposits containing . In addition to metal-rich ores, hydrothermal vents host ecosystems based on . Although there has been considerable effort to study the biology and ecology of vent systems in the decades since these systems were first discovered, there has been limited attention paid to conservation issues. Three priority recommendations for conservation science at hydrothermal vent settings are identified here: (i) determine the natural conservation units for key species with differing life histories; (ii) identify a set of first principles for the design of preservation reference areas and conservation areas; (iii) develop and test methods for effective mitigation and restoration to enhance the recovery of biodiversity in sulphide systems that may be subject to open-cut mining."

"ecosystems have stimulated decades of and hold promise of mineral and genetic resources that also serve societal needs. Some endemic taxa thrive only in vent environments, and vent-associated organisms are adapted to a variety of natural disturbances, from tidal variations to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In this paper, physicochemical and biological impacts of a range of human activities at vents are considered. , albeit at a local scale, based on our current understanding of ecological responses to disturbance. Natural recovery from a single mining event depends on immigration and larval recruitment and colonization; understanding processes and dynamics influencing life-history stages may be a key to effective minimization and mitigation of mining impacts. Cumulative impacts on of several mining projects in a single region, without proper management, include possible species extinctions and shifts in community structure and function."

"Nitrogen (N) enrichment is an element of that could influence the growth and abundance of many s. In this , I synthesized responses of microbial to N additions in 82 published field studies. I hypothesized that the biomass of , bacteria or the microbial community as a whole would be altered under N additions. I also predicted that changes in biomass would parallel changes in soil CO2 emissions. Microbial biomass declined 15% on average under , but fungi and bacteria were not significantly altered in studies that examined each group separately. Moreover, declines in abundance of microbes and fungi were more evident in studies of longer durations and with higher total amounts of N added. In addition, responses of microbial biomass to N fertilization were significantly correlated with responses of soil CO2 emissions. There were no significant effects of biomes, fertilizer types, ambient N deposition rates or methods of measuring biomass. Altogether, these results suggest that N enrichment could reduce microbial biomass in many ecosystems, with corresponding declines in soil CO2 emissions."

"In this commentary, I advocate for more detailed incorporation of in , to improve our projections of . Current Earth system models display relatively low predictability of stocks, which limit our ability to estimate future climate conditions. A more explicit incorporation of microbial mechanisms can increase the accuracy of ecosystem-scale models that inform the larger-scale Earth system models. Of the numerous microbial groups that can influence soil C dynamics, AM fungi are particularly tractable for integration in models. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are globally abundant and perform critical roles in , such as augmentation of net and soil C storage. Moreover, AM communities exhibit relatively low diversity within ecosystems, compared to other microbial groups. In addition, global datasets of AM ecology are available for use in model development. Thus, AM communities can be readily simulated in next-generation trait-based models that link microbial diversity to ecosystem function. Altogether, we are well-poised to incorporate the dynamics of individual AM taxa in ecosystem models, which can then be coupled to Earth system models. Hopefully, these efforts would advance our ability to predict and plan for future climate change."

"When trees build wood, is incorporated. It takes a long time to decompose ... It’s a smaller scale in . Some of the material they make can be almost woody. The is tough to decompose. The cell walls stay in the soil, microscopically. ... It adds up to a lot ... twice as much carbon in the soil as in the , and much of that is in [fungi]."

"I asked whether —applies to microbes. I conducted a synthesis of empirical studies that tested relationships among microbial traits presumed to define the competitive, stress tolerance and ruderal, and other ecological strategies. There was broad support for Grime's triangle. However, the ecological strategies were inconsistently linked to shifts in under environmental changes like nitrogen and phosphorus addition, warming, , etc. We may be missing important ecological strategies that more closely influence microbial community composition under shifting environmental conditions. We may need to start by documenting changes in microbial communities in response to environmental conditions at fine spatiotemporal scales relevant for microbes. We can then develop empirically based ecological strategies, rather than modifying those based on . Synthesis. Microbes appear to sort into similar ecological strategies as plants. However, these microbial ecological strategies do not consistently predict how community composition will shift under environmental change. By starting ‘from the ground up’, we may be able to delineate ecological strategies more relevant for microbes."

"entails the regulation of , cell expansion, and , and patterning of the organ as a whole. s are ideally suited to dissecting these processes. Petals are dispensable for growth and reproduction, enabling varied manipulations to be carried out with ease. In ', petals have a simple laminar structure with a small number of cell types, facilitating the analysis of organogenesis. This review summarizes recent studies that have illuminated some of the complex interplay between the s controlling petal specification, growth and differentiation in Arabidopsis. These advances, coupled with the advantages of using petals as a model , provide an excellent platform to investigate the underlying mechanisms driving plant organogenesis."

"Flowers are organized into concentric s of s, s, s and s, with each of these floral organ types having a unique role in ... Sepals enclose and protect the flower bud, while petals can be large and showy so as to attract s (or people!). Stamens produce pollen grains that contain male gametes, while the carpels contain the ovules that when fertilized will produce the seeds. While the size, shape, number and elaboration of each of these organ types can be quite different, the same general organization of four floral organ types arranged in concentric whorls exists across all species. As I shall explain in this Primer, the ‘ABC model’ is a simple and satisfying explanation for how this conserved floral architecture is genetically specified. What is the ABC model? The ABC model was first explicitly articulated in 1991, in a seminal paper by and . Although s affecting floral organ identity had been known for centuries, it was the systematic analyses of these mutations, and of the phenotypes produced by double and triple mutants, that proved to be critical in developing the ABC model."

"As a graduate student, I encountered a book that still inspires me: Classic Papers in Genetics edited by . Sadly, it is now out of print, but it is a wonderful compendium of many groundbreaking papers,starting with Mendel’s ‘Experiments in Plant Hybridization’. It also includes several papers by my scientific hero, , who figured out the principle of as an undergraduate, and whose papers are a model of clarity and careful reasoning. I also really enjoy reading Peters’ prefaces to each paper, which place each work in its scientific and historical context."