Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!
It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.
In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.
Science is to be much commended for the ingenuity, the patience, and the persistency it displays in the invention of instruments wherewith to ferret out the secrets of nature.
But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.
It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.
It is therefore no wonder that modern thought, to the extent that it reduces man from a spiritual to a purely biological entity, elevates the state of inexorable competition, conflict, and self-serving aggression from a tragic lapse of our ordained d...
To this motive which encourages me is added another which made up my mind: after I have upheld, according to my natural intelligence, the side of truth, no matter what success I have, there is a prize which I cannot fail to win. I will find it in the...
However, science, by its very nature, forms its own inherent boundaries to man’s progress. . . Focused as it is on the world out there, categorizing and measuring, theorizing and concluding all things based on external evidence and proof, science m...
There are a lot of things animals do that we can't," she says, "like flying and camouflage, and we've adapted, through technology ... It's funny when people say something is natural, or not. Compared with what? Compared with when? It's this vanity of...
The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of in the 'Protogaea' and of in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of , in the latter...
Who that has ever visited the borders of this classic sea, has not felt at the first sight of its waters a glow of reverent rapture akin to devotion, and an instinctive sensation of thanksgiving at being permitted to stand before these hallowed waves...
The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge...
Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film....
It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
There can be no law of nature, no science, No aberrant infliction of human will That unchained the soul cannot conquer, Simply sweep away, should it chose to.
The man whose acquaintance with the world does not lead him deeper than science leads him, will never understand what it is that the man with the spiritual vision finds in these natural phenomena.
A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don't know what's there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises.
