Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

But there is another kind of hope—it’s the challenge of learning about the real world and using our intelligence to change things for the better. In this way, it’s the individual who is empowered to bring hope to the world.

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.

On my deathbed, one thought I will surely have comes from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He notes that we who die are the lucky ones. Most people—most genetic combinations of who could ever exist—will never be born, and so will never have the opportunity to die.

So death is a kind of privilege of those few of us who have known life. Such a cosmic perspective empowers me to celebrate every day I am alive. And I share it with you, as a kind of scientific solace on the life and death of your loved ones.

As for the urge to believe in an afterlife, note that for most of the history of life on Earth you did not exist. A condition that continued right up until your birth. That is not a hard thought to consider. Nor is it depressing. You simply had no existence or awareness of anything at all. It should therefore not be hard to consider the likelihood that the state of death is no different.

“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.”

Natural selection never claims perfect design, or even good design, only a design that is more effective than that of a competing species, allowing survival long enough to reproduce. Nothing else matters to the process.

My answer is—I do not worry about what they know as much as I worry about how they think. This just might be the highest of all pedagogical goals, because the most important moments in life occur at times when how we think will matter more than what we know.