On the other hand, the sun of Naples might be conducive to learning something about the biochemistry of the embryonic development of marine animals.
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.
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.
We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.
The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.
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.
Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.
A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.
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?
Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.
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.
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.
Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.
Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.
I don’t think we are here for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating a good lunch.
The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.
Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.