Zitat des Tages von Michael Shermer:
In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.
Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.
But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.
Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals.
The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.
Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.
Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.
The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
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.
As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.
When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.
We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.
For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void.
Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There's a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature.
In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.
Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.
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.
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.