Michael Specter > Quotes

“People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.”
― Michael Specter

“Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.”
― Michael Specter

“We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.”
― Michael Specter

“Experts chosen to represent a specific point of view are cheerleaders, not scientists. And people who rely on them are denialists.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful.”
― Michael Specter

“But there is no such thing as safe. There is only safe than something else. Skiing and driving cars are thousands of times more dangerous than walking or cycling. Yet we never refuse to enter a motor vehicle because it "may" cause death.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“Any chemical, whether is comes from the root of a tree or the shelves of your medicine cabinet, can cause serious harm. It depends how much you take. That is why one of the fundamental tenets of medicine holds that "the dose makes the poison.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“That's the power of the open-source approach to intellectual goods. Even if Monsanto had wanted to control the world's gran, the company would never have succeeded: farmers save and share seeds, and in countries like Bangladesh and India national seed-breeding programs have been instituted to make sure people can get seed they can afford. There are open-source grains and cheap public seed banks in many developing countries.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“A plant bred in a laboratory is no more or less "real" than a baby born through in vitro fertilization. The traits matter, not the process.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“NATURAL” DOES NOT mean good, or safe, or healthy, or wholesome. It never did. In fact, legally, it means nothing at all. Mercury, lead, and asbestos are natural, and so are viruses, E. coli, and salmonella. A”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives

“There is a phrase used commonly in medicine: "true, true, and unrelated." It is meant to remind physicians not to confuse coincidence with cause. That kind of skepticism, while a fundamental tenet of scientific research, is less easily understood by laymen.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“The earth isn't utopia and never will be--but insisting that we can feed nine billion people with organic food is nothing more than utopian extremism, and the most distressing and pernicious kind of denialism. An organic universe sounds delightful, but it would consign millions of people in Africa and throughout much of Asia to malnutrition and death. That is a risk everyone should be able to understand.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“Without accepting some risk we would never have had vaccines, X-rays, airplanes, or antibiotics. Caution is simply a different kind of risk, one that is even more likely to kill people”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“Those vaccines, and others, have prevented unimaginable misery. But the misery is only unimaginable to Americans today because they no longer need to know such diseases exist.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

“Nonetheless, the bigger problem has little to do with any particular product or industry, but with the way we look at risk. America takes the Hollywood approach, going to extremes to avoid the rare but dramatic risk--the chance that minutes residues of pesticide applied to our food will kill us, or that we will die in a plane crash...
... On the other hand, we constantly expose ourselves to the likely risks of daily life, riding bicycles (and even motorcycles) without helmets, for example. We think nothing of exceeding the speed limit, and rarely worry about the safety features of the cars we drive. The dramatic rarities, like plane crashes, don't kill us. The banalities of everyday life do.”
― Michael Specter

“It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power.” And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain—one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure.”
― Michael Specter, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives