The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.

I think it’s unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things.

Great books are rare.

We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.

It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.

It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules.

Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.

In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy.

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

The final arbitrator in philosophy is not how we think but what we do.

One of Kuhn’s marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.

All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results – especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.

Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work.

The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.

Opinion is the companion of probability within the medieval epistemology.

One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people ‘expect‘ things to be discovered.

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school.

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.

The stability of what’s called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

A ‘philosophical dictionary‘ is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.

Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull.

Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.