Related:

• In arguing that current theories of brain function cast suspicion on ESP
  psychokinesis, reincarnation, and so on, I am frequently challenged with the most popular of all neuro-mythologies -- the notion that we ordinarily use only 10 percent of our brains....
• Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data.
  More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts....
• Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around the sun.
  At one time this was called the Copernican theory...
• Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data.
  More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts....
• While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possessio
  conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence" from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity....
• The book is worth attention for only two reasons: (1) it attacks attempts to expose sham paranormal studie
  and (2) it is very well and plausibly written and so rather harder to dismiss or refute by simple jeering....
• Our journeys to the stars will be made on spaceships created by determined
  hardworking scientists and engineers applying the principles of science, not aboard flying saucers piloted by little gray aliens from some other dimension....
• It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
  -- Martin Gardner, Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol....
• The inability to benefit from feedback appears to be the primary cause of pseudoscience.
  Pseudoscientists retain their beliefs and ignore or distort contradictory evidence rather than modify or reject a flawed theory....