1195) Unlike the useless versifying and arbitrary punishments that filled my [British public-]school days, science is an ordered realm of theory, law and facts, where mysteries are resolved and reason prevails, though often not without struggle. Like a slowly spreading pool of light, science now comprehends much of the natural world and is fast reaching to describe the central verities of living things. The achievement bespeaks a degree of understanding that the thinkers of past centuries would have deemed beyond price. An education that doesn't reflect the hard-won ability to comprehend much of the natural world, and rates science no more necessary than Latin, would befit the Dark Ages.

Nicholas Wade
"Method & Madness: Learning Disabled"
New York Times Magazine (7/23/95)

1196) To be a scientist--it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious--he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

Sinclair Lewis
Arrowsmith (1925)
spoken by the character "Gottleib" [WQ]
posted by Susan L. Forsburg [UAQ] (7/7/95)

1197) Scientists are so blamed wise and so packed full of knowledge that they cannot comprehend why God has made nearly all the rest of mankind so infernally stupid.

Edwin W. Scripps
quoted by Dorothy Nelkin in
Selling Science: How the Press Covers
Science and Technology (1987)
posted by Louise Winder [IQM] (7/5/95)

1198) Much in the humanities has no answer, for the language is innocent of data. They lack the rub of the real.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Sex, Gender, and Fantasy"
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (9/95)

1199) Could the rigid rectangularity of the checkerboard midwest have a great deal to do with their sex lives? The furrow lines in fields draw you forward to the infinity where parallels meet, over the horizon. In the grip of such geometry, such mathematical order, the impatient, snaky pant and slither of sex doesn't fit. The American instinct, pinned to the Euclidean landscape, has been to mechanize their own reproduction, just as they did to wheat.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Sex, Gender, and Fantasy"
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (9/95)

1200) A recent study of psychotherapy techniques showed that patients had just a good a chance of improving if they skipped their Freudian-based therapy sessions entirely, and went for a walk.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Sex, Gender, and Fantasy"
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (9/95)

1201) The fashionable attitudes of our time hold that homosexuality is perfectly all right because it is a right, like free speech. The political language revolves around "sexual preference," trivializing a profound inner sense into a fashion choice. [...] A more persuasive argument rests on biology itself. Homosexuality persists in all societies, and indeed, among the higher primates generally, because it has an evolutionary role. [...] [A] gay man or woman can work for the betterment of his or her relations, laboring in the tribe as specialized labor, free of the burden of child rearing. Gay males may have been leaders, or explorers, or craftsmen. They might have stayed close to their mothers, to protect while the other men were away. Lesbians could have done general service in child rearing, or helped hunt (woman often have a better sense of smell). There are available, specialized labor, just as men and women adapt to special tasks.

These are "Just So"-style stories explaining why given traits emerged. The crucial point is that they did, in the crucible of rapid human evolution. [...] [B]ecause the gay brother or sister labors on, the tribe as a whole has a better chance of surviving. Homosexuality need not be accepted because it is a right, but rather because it is indeed natural. It is preferred as a minority strategy by evolution of the hunter-gatherer hominids we once were [...] and still is.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Sex, Gender, and Fantasy"
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (9/95)

1202) The rule of the genes was like the government of the old Hapsburg Empire, 'Despotismus gemildert durch Schlamperei' ('Despotism tempered by sloppiness').

One of the most interesting developments in modern genetics is the discovery of 'Junk DNA,' a substantial component of our cellular inheritance which appears to have no biological function. Junk DNA is nucleic acid which does us no good and no harm, merely taking a free ride in our cells and taking advantage of our efficient replicative apparatus. It is difficult to measure the fraction of our DNA that is functional. Several lines of evidence indicate that as much as half of it may be junk. The prevalence of Junk DNA is a striking example of the sloppiness which life has always embodied in one form or another. It is easy to find in human culture the analogue of Junk DNA. Junk culture is replicated together with memes, just as Junk DNA is replicated together with genes. Junk culture is the rubbish of civilization, television commercials and astrology and jukeboxes and political propaganda. Tolerance of junk is one of life's most essential characteristics. In every sphere of life, whether cultural, economic, ecological or cellular, the systems which survive best are those which are not too fine-tuned to carry a large load of junk. And so, I believe, it must have been at the beginning. I would be surprised if the first living cell were not at least 25 percent junk.

Freeman Dyson
Infinite In All Directions (1988)
Cynthia Price, personal e-mail (7/11/95)