Embedded Files
The importance of stupidity in science, Journal of Cell Science
"One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time."
It matters who does science, Science
"The soundbite “trust the science” has been circulating recently. This framing is unfortunate. Because “the science” in this context is usually a snapshot of ideas or facts in a particular moment—and often from the perspective of a small number of people (or even one person). It would have been better to use a phrase like “trust the scientific process,” which would imply that science is what we know now, the product of the work of many people over time, and principles that have reached consensus in the scientific community through established processes of peer review and transparent disclosure."
What if other human species hadn't died out, BBC Future
"...humans vary in how well we do all these things. I'm less literary than Jane Austen, less musical than Taylor Swift, less articulate than Martin Luther King. In these respects, am I less human than they are?"
"...our species isn't that diverse. Homo sapiens shows less genetic diversity than your average bacterial strain, our bodies show less variation in shape than sponges, or roses, or oak trees. But in our behaviour, humanity is wildly diverse. We are hunters, farmers, mathematicians, soldiers, explorers, carpenters, criminals, artists. There are so many different ways of being human, so many different aspects to the human condition, and each of us has to define and discover what it means to be human."
No species is an island, Nautilus
"No species is an island
Entire of itself
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manor of thy friends or of thine own were.
Each species’ death diminishes me,
For I am involved in Life.
And therefore never send to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. "
This land of ligers, ACU Review
"Surely then, some ideas of the sanctity of species are not based on science, but perhaps on our notions of purity. So strong are these that conservationists are loathe to breed the highly inbred and vulnerable Asiatic lion with the far more genetically diverse African lion, which could produce healthy hybrids and create greater resilience in the population to disease and other factors. Again, how far our notions of nature are from the fuzziness of reality!"
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