Nonsense on Stilts Quotes

“[T]he nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Following the Post Modernist route, we may indeed never arrive at meaning, but not because meaning is not there... only because we are lost in endless linguistic games that are entirely beside the point.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“[T]he downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Science progresses. Ideology tends to linger unchanged, and often unquestioned.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact. —Thomas Sowell, American economist”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“as astronomer Carl Sagan once aptly put it, you do not want to keep your mind so open that your brain is likely to fall out.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Given the power and influence that science increasingly has in our daily lives, it is important that we as citizens of an open and democratic society learn to separate good science from bunk. This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity, as it affects where large portions of our tax money go, and in some cases even whether people’s lives are lost as a result of nonsense.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“…the boundaries separating science, nonscience, and pseudoscience are much fuzzier and more permeable than Popper (or, for that matter, most scientists) would have us believe. There is, in other words, no litmus test.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“having a Ph.D. and working in a university is neither necessary nor certainly sufficient to provide one with unquestionable authority, no matter what the subject.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“For example, a set of twenty-five studies involving five hundred astrologers examined the average degree of agreement between astrological predictions. In social science, such as in psychology, tests that have less than o.8 (i.e., 8o percent) agreement level are considered unreliable. Astrology's reliability is an embarrassingly low o. I, with a variability around the mean of o.o6 standard deviations. This means that there is, on average, no agreement at all among the predictions made by different astrologers.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“What these cases of success in the hard sciences have in common is that they really do lend themselves to a straightforward logical analysis: there is a limited number of options, and they are mutually exclusive. Just like logical trees work
very well in classic Aristotelian logic (where the only values that can be attached to a proposition are true or false), so strong inference works well with a certain type of scientific question.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that or which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about this beyond the possibilities of knowledge." So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, who thought-in the tradition of writers and philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Paine-that we have a moral duty to distinguish sense from nonsense.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“if I think (and I do) that Deepak Chopra talks nonsense when he tells people about quantum mechanical elixirs of youth, I would first have to be an expert in quantum mysticism. But the problem is that quantum mysticism is (I think) quackery, and that therefore there is no such thing as an “expert” on quantum mysticism.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“It is instructive to note that different cultures "discovered" completely different constellations in the sky, a fact that is more consistent with the idea that constellations are a whimsical projection of the human mind than a reflection of astronomic reality.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Or maybe, another explanation goes, we are in fact surrounded by ETs and simply don't know it, perhaps because they decided to make the solar system a natural reserve, a place where other races can go and see what it is like to be in the infancy of civilization (appropriately, this has been nicknamed the "zoo hypothesis").”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“The many-worlds theory basically maintains that the reason quantum mechanics seems so strange is because we have access to only one of an infinite number of worlds. From our narrow perspective, the output of certain measurements
(like that of the double-slit experiment) seems random and probabilistic, but that is an artifact of the fact that, literally, we don't have the full picture.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“These and similar examples are easy enough to uncover, and they make two crucial points: first, good science does not require experiments, it can be done with an intelligent use of observational evidence; second, there is more than one way to do science, depending on the nature of the questions and the methods typical of the field.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“one does not need experiments to do science. While this claim may sound strange and counterintuitive at first, a moment's reflection will show that it is obviously true: astronomers do not conduct experiments, and yet we think of astronomy as solidly situated within the sciences, not the humanities or the pseudosciences. Why? Because astronomers can carry out the two fundamental activities that, jointly considered, truly characterize a science: systematic observations and the construction and testing of hypotheses.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“It seems to me trivially true that particle physics does in fact deal with the simplest objects in the entire universe: atoms and their constituents. At the opposite extreme, biology takes on the most complex things known to humanity: organisms made of billions of cells, and ecosystems whose properties are affected by tens of thousands of variables.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“science makes progress not by proving its theories right-because that's impossible-but by eliminating an increasing number of wrong theories. Pseudoscience, however, does not make progress because its "theories" are so flexible that they can accommodate any observation whatsoever, which means that pseudoscientific theories do not actually have any explanatory teeth.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Popper rightly believed that the public-not just scientists or philosophers-needs to understand and appreciate that distinction, because science is too powerful and important, and pseudoscience too common and damaging, for an open society to afford ignorance on the matter.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Eugenicists weren't just about propaganda, they catalyzed significant political action. As early as 1896 the state of Connecticut passed a eugenic law according to which anyone who was epileptic, imbecile, or feeble-minded could not obtain a marriage license.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“the nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“British astronomer royal Richard Woolley, who in 1956 said, "All this talk about space travel is utter bilge, really."10 Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth just five years later.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.-Adam Smith”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“CEI in 1992 "advised" the Food and Drug Administration to approve recombinant bovine somatotropin, which is a bioengineered growth hormone. Now surely such recommendation would be accompanied by the further suggestion of labeling the resulting products so that consumer choice- that ultimate driver of market forces-could be openly exercised? Think again: the CEI argued that mandatory labeling of dairy products is "inappropriate" because it violates the First Amendment (which includes the right to free speech-of the cows?).”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Richard Dawkins lamented,9 we think that our kids need to have "fun, fun, fun" rather than, say, experience wonder or interest (they are not the same thing) when going to school or a museum.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Scientific theories are tested every time someone makes an observation or conducts an experiment, so it is misleading to think of science as an edifice, built on foundations. Rather, scientific knowledge is more like a web. The difference couldn’t be more crucial. A tall edifice can collapse – if the foundations upon which it was built turn out to be shaky. But a web can be torn in several parts without causing the collapse of the whole. The damaged threads can be patiently replaced and re-connected with the rest – and the whole web can become stronger, and more intricate.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“According to news reports, members of the sect believed in an assortment of pseudoreligious and paranormal ideas, including resurrection (obviously), astrology, and psychic powers. They were also avid watchers of paranormal shows on TV. This of course does not imply that watching The X-Files leads to suicide, just like millions of people playing Grand Theft Auto video games are not automatically turned into criminals on a rampage.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk