#scientific

Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#dogs #ever #get #hundreds #lost

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#character #conscious #human #influence #intellect

Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified. ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#another #causes #compared #cures #happiness

Could a government dare to set out with happiness as its goal? Now that there are accepted scientific proofs, it would be easy to audit the progress of national happiness annually, just as we monitor money and GDP. ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#annually #audit #could #dare #easy

But the fact of the matter is that all scientific evidence would show, based upon what we know about this disease, that muscle cuts - that is, the meat of the animal itself - should not cause any risk to human health. ↗

— Ann Veneman

#animal #any #based #cause #cuts

Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act. ↗

— Max Weber

#achieved #act #again #always #become

I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood. ↗

— Patrick White

#breathed #cannot #component #dividing #explain

At any rate, girls are differently situated. Having no need of deep scientific knowledge, their education is confined more to the ordinary things of the world, the study of the fine arts, and of the manners and dispositions of people. ↗

— William John Wills

#arts #confined #deep #differently #dispositions

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already. But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#biology #coccyx #darwinism #dna #evolution

One of the things that I've been doing recently in my scientific research is to ask this question: Is the universe actually capable of performing things like digital computations? ↗

— Seth Lloyd

#ask #been #capable #computations #digital