Morgan Blackledge

“scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct, which with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. —JOHN VON NEUMANN”
― William R. Miller, Rethinking Substance Abuse: What the Science Shows, and What We Should Do about It

“With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“if Darwin were alive today, he would likely revise a significant part of his great works, because the basic logic of evolution has shifted away from capital-n Nature toward two new core drivers: Unnatural selection* Nonrandom mutation*”
― Juan Enriquez, Evolving Ourselves: Redesigning the Future of Humanity--One Gene at a Time