22 quotes
In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Every new set of discoveries raises a host of questions which we were never before wise enough even to ask.
Broca's Brain (1979)
People are rarely grateful for a demonstration of their credulity.
Broca's Brain (1979)
The best antidote for pseudoscience, I firmly believe, is science.
Broca's Brain (1979)
The idea of science as a method rather than as a body of knowledge is not widely appreciated outside of science, or indeed in some corridors inside of science.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Whether we believe in God depends very much on what we mean by God.
Broca's Brain (1979)
It is merely a coincidence. When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.
Broca's Brain (1979)
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Broca was quoted as saying, “I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.”
Broca's Brain (1979)
I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Broca's Brain (1979)
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.
Broca's Brain (1979)
We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path that will take us to the stars—unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.
Broca's Brain (1979)
It is a good idea not to make up our minds prematurely on this issue. It is probably best not to let our personal preferences influence the decision. Rather, in the long tradition of successful science, we should permit nature to reveal the truth to us.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood.
Broca's Brain (1979)
A clear prediction in an area undergoing vigorous study permits doctrines to be subject to disproof. The last posture a bureaucratic religion wishes to find itself in is vulnerability to disproof, where an experiment can be performed on which the religion stands or falls.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature.
Broca's Brain (1979)
But there is a chance that the answers will discomfit a great many bureaucratic and doctrinal religions. The idea of religion as a body of belief, immune to criticism, fixed forever by some founder is, I think, a prescription for the long-term decay of the religion, especially lately.
Broca's Brain (1979)
For many people, the shoddily thought out doctrines of borderline science are the closest approximation to comprehensible science readily available. The popularity of borderline science is a rebuke to the schools, the press and commercial television for their sparse, unimaginative and ineffective efforts at science education; and to us scientists, for doing so little to popularize our subject.
Broca's Brain (1979)
Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful.
Broca's Brain (1979)