Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.
Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.
Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’.
To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation.
Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be ‘civilised’ – or corrupted, depending on your point of view.
Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens.
Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad – a privileged source unavailable to atheists.
Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.
Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.
That 45 per cent figure really is something of a national educational disgrace. You’d have to travel right past Europe to the theocratic societies around the Middle East before you hit a comparable level of anti-scientific miseducation. It is bafflingly paradoxical that the United States is by far the world’s leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World.
People growing up in different countries copy their parents and believe in the god or gods of their own country. These beliefs contradict each other, so they can’t all be right.
But that doesn’t stop it being true. And far more often than it is bewildering or frightening, scientific truth is wonderful, beautiful. You need courage to face the frightening, bewildering conclusions of science; and with the courage comes the opportunity to experience all that wonder and beauty. The courage to cut yourself adrift from comforting, tame apparent certainties and embrace the wild truth. Like my friend Julia did when she lost her Christian faith.
Scientific truths are true even if there’s nobody around to know about them; were true before humans appeared; will be true after we are extinct.
The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising – or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process.
There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being;.
If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!
I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.
Have lucky stars swum into Uranus?
The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.
45 per cent of the population of the United States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: that all species separately owe their existence to ‘intelligent design’ less than ten thousand years ago.