20 quotes
The study of social setting does not imply either the irrelevance or nonexistence of a factual world out there.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Scientists ignorant of history are not so much condemned to repeat it, as to be confused and unenterprising.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Useful quantification is so often the key to fruitful science.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Nature has no automatically transferable wisdom to serve as the basis of human morality. Passive observation and unquestioned reverence for nature are no substitute for ethical philosophy.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Few campaigns are more dangerous than emotional calls for proscription rather than thought.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
The world is a complex place. In our struggles to simplify and understand, we often identify some bugbear and then make it responsible for all evils.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
No serious student of human behavior denies the potent influence of evolved biology upon our cultural lives. Our struggle is to figure out how biology affects us, not whether it does.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Just as no one is quite so stupid as to nullify biology completely, so too does no one deny some flexibility in the translation of genes into complex behaviors.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
No one doubts that biological universals exist. We must sleep, eat, and grow older, and we are not about to give up procreation; almost all our social institutions are influenced by these imperatives.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
An overtly expressed political commitment does not debar a scientist from viewing nature accurately—if only because no honest scientist or effective political activist would be foolish enough to advance a program in evident discord with the world as we find it.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Yesterday’s seer is today’s bore.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Jastrow and a few other astronomers have tried to find God in the universe by reading the big bang as the cosmological equivalent of Genesis. I confess that I have found it hard to take this argument seriously.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Biological evolution is a theory about ties of physical genealogy based on reproduction with error and natural selection. Computers do not breed. Any direction imparted to biology by its Darwinian mechanism does not translate to pathways of industrial change; a biological past is no sure guide to a technological future.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Ever since paleontology established the basic outlines of the fossil record more than a century ago, we have known how poorly the old chain of being matches the history of life. Its persistence as a metaphor and even, in Jastrow’s case, as an imposed “reality” merely reflects our unwillingness to abandon comfort in the face of evidence.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)