And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don’t like to be reminded of how frail we are – how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended.
He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents.
People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity-our most necessary resourse?
When the first giant bones were found in the 1820s and 1830s, scientists felt obliged to explain the bones as belonging to some oversize variant of a modern species. This was because it was believed that no species could ever become extinct, since God would not allow one of His creations to die. Eventually it became clear that this conception of God was mistaken, and the bones belonged to extinct animals.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.
The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half.
Inevitably, underlying instabilities begin to appear.
We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
Plants evolve like every other form of life, and they’ve come up with their own forms of aggression, defense, and so on. In the nineteenth century, most theories concerned animals – nature red in tooth and claw, all that. But now scientists are thinking about nature green in root and stem. We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms to warn other plants, to outright chemical warfare.
The technician consulted the enclosed documents. “Lizard is biting local children. They have a question about identification of the species, and a concern about diseases transmitted from the bite.” She produced a child’s picture of a lizard, signed TINA at the top. “One of the kids drew a picture of the lizard.
How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.
If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal,” Morton said, “it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.
Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don’t look so surprised. I’m not saying anything you don’t know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories.
Life is too short, and DNA too long.
They want to see their expectation... Entertainment has nothing to do reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.
Understanding is a delaying tactic.
Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.
He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround.
In general, people who aren’t in touch with their emotions tend to think their emotions are unimportant.