Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

IQ correlates nicely with GPA in high school and college, but after your first job, nobody ever asks what your college GPA was. What matters are your people skills, leadership skills, real-world problem solving skills, integrity, business acumen, reliability, ambition, work ethic, kindness, compassion, etc. So for me, conversations about race and IQ are of no practical consequence, any more than are conversations about race and hair color, or race and food preferences.

The theory of evolution is not something to “believe in.” Science follows evidence. And when strong evidence supports an idea, the concept of belief, when invoked the way religious people use the word, is unnecessary. In other words, established science is not an ensemble of beliefs, it’s a system of ideas supported by verifiable evidence.

We share more than 90% identical DNA with all mammals, even mice.

sifting for the fundamental drivers of a cause or phenomenon—stripped of all ornament.

America spends upwards of $100 billion per year in

cash payments to farmers so that they do not grow crops. This, itself, is more than six times NASA’s annual budget.

When you assess all the parts and functions of the body, we should be amazed that human physiology works at all. So when parts fail, as they will for all of us at some point, or even when tragedy strikes, as in your lost friends in the Corps, not enough of us reflect on how amazing it was to have been alive in the first place.

The Judeo-Christian Bible is likely the greatest (single) source of tribalistic conflict the world has ever known.

huge snowfalls are indications of warm snowstorms not cold ones.

Scientists never “prove” anything.

what we do is demonstrate, with sufficient experiments, that a consensus exists and further evidence in support of an idea would be a waste of effort or funding since other pressing questions remain unanswered.

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.” Just to be clear, the existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with the age of the Earth. Most

Read, Read, Read. Think. Think. Think. Read, Read, Read.

their primary intellectual stimulation came not from school, but from books they read at home—alone.