Guy P. Harrison Quotes

But even bad museums can have value. The Creation Museum (Kentucky, USA), for example, may be a vulgar monument to pseudoscience and deception, but it can teach us important things about American culture and humankind in general. I visited museums in a couple of communist countries that were like supervolcanoes of absurd propaganda. But they made me think more about patriotism and the national mythologies of all countries.

Evolution does not mean improvement. There is no ladder of progress, no foresight, no plan, no goal. Evolution is the unintelligent and indifferent process of life changing over time. It doesn't prepare lifeforms for the future. It can't because the future is unknown. With evolution, the only winning is being alive right now and the only losing is being extinct. Every species on Earth today is tied for first. We can't rank contemporary lifeforms as more or less evolved than others. And we can't rank the long-term survivability of species because today's big flashy advantage could be tomorrow's death sentence. The mighty human brain, for example, might turn out to be a doomsday device. If we destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons then big primate brains would have been just another evolutionary dead-end.

QAnon is a claim so extraordinarily vacuous that it can almost serve as the perfect litmus test for the pathological absence of critical thinking.

“This is an exciting moment in human history. Collectively, as a species, we are standing at the mouth of the deepest and darkest cave of all. As we lean in and turn on the flashlight, we can be confident that wonderful secrets await.

Every person is a collective, a vast and complex gathering of interdependent life. Any description of 'human' must acknowledge these intimate strangers. Our bond with microbes is such that they are not so much riders, parasites, and assistants as part human. And we, it's becoming increasingly clear, may need to begin thinking of ourselves as part microbe.

Critical thinking is the indispensable skill for smart living in modern society, and skepticism is the essential posture for the fully awake twenty-first-century human being.

Mozart's music on a smartphone can't redeem or compensate for our lust for the ludicrous. Suckers for empty promises, false hopes, and pseudoscientific babble, we are our own worst enemies. Few people take the time to learn how brains process sensory input in misleading ways and how subconscious biases influence conscious thinking. The result is a global population teeming with easy targets for digitized nonsense and deception.

“The brain produces a customized representation of a scene. What we see, as a matter of routine, are functional fantasies meant to be of practical use. If more people filtered every important observation through an awareness of this, it could significantly reduce self-deception and irrationality. And that would be a big step toward a more sensible world.

Appreciate the magnificent brain you possess. Protect and nurture it. Strive to be a good skeptic and critical thinker so that fewer hours of your precious life will be squandered on dead-end beliefs. Always try to think like a scientist so that you might better know truth from fiction.

It's the 21st century and still we have no universally agreed upon definition of life. It seems the universe does not care about our desire for tidy categories and tight descriptions. Our intellectual comfort is irrelevant to reality. When it comes to life, gray zones and blurry boundaries abound. This is bizarre considering life has been on our planet for more than 3.5 billion years and it's all around us now. Life saturates Earth's surface zone, from more than a mile deep in the crust to the stratosphere miles above. Its diversity and overall success are staggering, difficult to comprehend. For example, some scientists estimate that there are more than one trillion species alive right now. In total, Earth may have hosted more than 100 trillion species so far. Life is no stranger to us. And yet, what is it?

We must use our brains to overcome our brains. You are the solution to this crazy world we find ourselves in. Do everything you can to reach others. Teach. Elevate. Encourage critical thinking. But do it with kindness and understanding. People who believe crazy things are only guilty of being human. Remember this and show compassion.

We all believe silly things. What matters is how silly and how many.

Don't passively accept contagions. Turn your mind into an immune system that intercepts invading ideas, assesses them, and destroys the bad ones.

Science is not the latest religion and scientists are not exalted priests. We have to think of science as a wonderful tool that is also dangerous. Using it requires responsibility. Science gives us vaccines one moment, nuclear warheads the next. It's up to us to be wise tool users.

The solutions to human problems can only be found in humans. We need to get out of our own way and start acting like sensible sane lifeforms. … Yes, we have a terrible tendency to be shortsighted, greedy, violent, and irrational. But we also have a remarkable capacity for trust, cooperation, and figuring things out.