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Believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

Michael Shermer

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Michael Shermer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 8
Historian Of Science
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sport Cyclist
Writer
Glendale
California
USA
Michael Brant Shermer
Much
Believing
Believe
Grass
Life
Cost
Wind
Dangerous
Animal
Doe
Rustle
May
Predator

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In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
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Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.
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Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
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Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
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Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.
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When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
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We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
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We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.
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We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.
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Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.
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Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
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Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.
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We do not just blindly concede control to authorities instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.
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I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
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In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.
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The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
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Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
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But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
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For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
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