Michael Shermer Quotes
Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience.
Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
Science is a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed or inferred phenomenon, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation.
No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
In science , all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith.
The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.
We want to be open-minded enough to accept radial new ideas when they occasionally come along, but we don't want to be so open-minded that our brains fall out.
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.
Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.
Providentially, learned habits can be unlearned, especially in the context of moral groups.
Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)
Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.
Science operates in the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, I go so far as to state that there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal.
Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty forindividuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also beprotected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose.
I say you don't need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful.