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

“Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.”
― 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

“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