Morgan Blackledge

“the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer really necessary for survival and reproduction.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“My caution kicks in when I encounter either one of two sorts of dramatic theories: those that claim to have found the secret of consciousness, and those that claim that the brain mechanisms for consciousness can never be found.”
― Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain

“If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“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