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• The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
  -- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Ma...
• We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life
  few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within....
• we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
  I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized brains--and I am equally confidant that our brains became large as an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting functions)....
• Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock.
  Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history....
• If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence
  hen we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy-- *sic transit gloria mundi*....
• The enemy of science is irrationalism, not religion. -- Stephen Jay Gould
• The 'principle' of the constancy of the velocity of light is not merely 'ununderstandable', it is not supported by 'objective matters of fact'
  it is untenable, and, as we shall see, unnecessary....
• We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
  -- Stephen Jay Gould...
• Special AI Seminar (abstract) It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge in order to perform well in complex domains.
  But knowledge alone is not sufficient for some applicatio...