#scienc

At the age of three and a half the Taung Child was eaten by an eagle. The evidence is that damage marks to the eye sockets of the fossil are identical to marks made by modern eagles on modern monkeys as they rip out their eyes. Poor little Taung Child, shrieking on the wind as you were borne aloft by the aquiline fury, you would have found no comfort in your destined fame, two and a half million years on, as the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#age

... nothing in Nature is black or white, few solutions are clean and clear; rather, reality, and especially our models of it, possess shades of gray throughout. ↗

— Eric Chaisson

#science #age

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care. ↗

— Laurie Garrett

#age

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity. ↗

— David Watson

#modernity #myth #science #social-ecology #age

From year to year, and from age to age, we see [biologists] at work, adding no doubt much to the unknown, and advancing many important interests, but, at the same time, doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views of nature. Experiments in however narrow a walk, facts of whatever minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies; all beyond is regarded with suspicion and distrust. ↗

— Robert Chambers

#science #age

Great scientists are Peter Pans, still anxious to classify and explain at an age when most people are concerned with money, power and sex. ↗

— David M. Knight

#science #age

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#economics #economists #expertise #intellect #mind

When you view your world exclusively through the lens of science, your prescription will never be strong enough. ↗

— Jay Nichols

#awe #creativity #left-brain #mysticism #quantum-physics

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#art #emotion #feeling #interpret #interpretation

To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows. ↗

— Wayne Gerard Trotman

#confidence #doubt #positive-attitude #positive-thinking #positivity