"Science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson. This blog has 45 Neil deGrasse Tyson posts. Please click the link "Neil deGrasse Tyson".

You want to click the link and watch the whole thing. It's free.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/shows/cosmos-possible-worlds

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

An exploration into human's potential for change.

I'm adding this stuff to my list of favorite quotes. The quotes are for Christian retards.

“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.” ― Aleister Crowley

“What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?”
-- Steven Novella

"A good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

The moronic childish god fantasy is good for nothing but getting in the way of human progress.

"Among other things, Tyson asserts that the religiosity of some of history's greatest scientists and their willingness to invoke the philosophy of intelligent design limited the scope of their inquiry into the natural world, to the detriment of scientific progress in general."

Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe.

Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.

I never met a Neil deGrasse Tyson video I didn't like.

To see 9 more Neil deGrasse Tyson videos, please click this
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB6B594473F65FF0C

Some more of my favorite quotes

Worship me or I'll torture you forever.
-- Your Loving God

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Religion is a cruel hoax sustained by miracles, fear, superstition and ignorance. Evolution is a science sustained by proven facts. Take your pick.
-- Dean Carson (A comment at the New York Times.)

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Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
-- J.B.S. Haldane

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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov

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Science hard. Brain hurt.
God easy. No think.

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Should Creationism be taught in public schools?
Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial….My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they’ve got a mental problem. We can’t afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I’m concerned.
-- Mike Gravel, former Democratic United States Senator from Alaska, who served two terms from 1969 to 1981, and a former candidate in the 2008 presidential election.

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I wrote this one: Theistic evolution is not evolution. It's a childish religious belief. It's a version of magical creation, not much better than the bullshit in Genesis.

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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin

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If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.
-- Jerry Coyne

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Science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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I wrote this one:

Evolution does not need defending because it's a basic scientific fact. The religious alternative, magical creation, is the most ridiculously stupid idea in the history of the human race. Creationism is more than an idiotic idea, it's a disease, a severe mental illness. Why do Christians deny the established truth of evolution, despite massive, powerful, and still growing evidence that's been accumulating for 150 years? There can be only one possible explanation. Christians (and their Muslim terrorist friends) are uneducated morons.

The magic god fairy of the gaps has run out of hiding places.

"Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand and now we do understand. If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem."
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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There are many more Neil deGrasse Tyson quotes at Wikiquote - Neil deGrasse Tyson

America has a political correctness problem and I’m sick of it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
✔@neiltyson

In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

12:58 PM - Aug 4, 2019

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Somebody else wrote

"Even if Tyson’s data be correct, it’s simply insensitive to try to make a point like this when hundreds are people are grieving over the three mass shootings we’ve had in the last week. Further, as Vanderpool notes, there are powerful lobbies—most notably the National Rifle Association (NRA)—trying to keep guns, including assault rifles, in the hands of Americans."

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What I wrote:

Complaining about what Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote is nitpicking. I saw nothing wrong with it. Also, it was interesting. 200 killed every day by car accidents. That would explain why I lost one of my best friends recently.

America has a political correctness problem and I’m sick of it.

A big problem in Idiot America is a large percentage of our teachers are uneducated god-soaked morons.

The magic god fairy of the gaps

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the stupid fucking assholes in Idiot America who try to stick their moronic religious fantasies into science education.

Is Neil deGrasse Tyson an atheist?

Is Neil deGrasse Tyson an atheist?

Mr. Tyson does not like to use the word "atheist" but he is 100% certain magic god fairies are not real. Whether he likes the word or not, he is an atheist.

I found this at Wikipedia:

In March 2014, philosopher and secularism proponent Massimo Pigliucci asked Tyson "What is it you think about God?" Tyson replied "I remain unconvinced by any claims anyone has ever made about the existence or the power of a divine force operating in the universe." Pigliucci then asked him why he expressed discomfort with the label "atheist" in his Big Think video. Tyson replied by reiterating his dislike for one-word labels, saying "That's what adjectives are for. What kind of atheist are you? Are you an ardent atheist? Are you a passive atheist? An apathetic atheist? Do you rally, or do you just not even care? So I'd be on the 'I really don't care' side of that, if you had to find adjectives to put in front of the word 'atheist.'"

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Tyson is an atheist. He just doesn't want to admit it. He doesn't want the idiotic god fantasy to get in the way of his career.

Christian morons deny they believe in a god fairy of the gaps. Then in the next sentence Christian fucktards invoke their fairy to explain what they don't understand. Christians are so fucking dense they don't realize they're constantly making a fool out of themselves.

"Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand.] If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Perimeter of Ignorance. A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge

The Perimeter of Ignorance

A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

From Natural History Magazine, November 2005

Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

Let's start at the top. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen. His laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, conceived in the mid-seventeenth century, account for cosmic phenomena that had eluded philosophers for millennia. Through those laws, one could understand the gravitational attraction of bodies in a system, and thus come to understand orbits.

Newton's law of gravity enables you to calculate the force of attraction between any two objects. If you introduce a third object, then each one attracts the other two, and the orbits they trace become much harder to compute. Add another object, and another, and another, and soon you have the planets in our solar system. Earth and the Sun pull on each other, but Jupiter also pulls on Earth, Saturn pulls on Earth, Mars pulls on Earth, Jupiter pulls on Saturn, Saturn pulls on Mars, and on and on.

Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop—leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:

The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,

Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. What he wants is data, inferr'd from the phænomena. But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:

Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.

A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. Sire, Laplace replied, I have no need of that hypothesis.

Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God—or the gods—wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor:

I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets' relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion—even though a mere century earlier, before Newton's achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.

Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that's where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That's where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life's complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:

I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies. . . . For the finger of God, and the Wisdom of Divine Providence, is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps—which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.

As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn't mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and common sense.

Galileo clearly distinguished the role of religion from the role of science. To him, religion was the service of God and the salvation of souls, whereas science was the source of exact observations and demonstrated truths. In a long, famous, bristly letter written in the summer of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (but, like so many epistles of the day, circulated among the literati), he quotes, in his own defense, an unnamed yet sympathetic church official saying that the Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

The letter to the duchess leaves no doubt about where Galileo stood on the literal word of the Holy Writ:

In expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. . . .

Nothing physical which . . . . demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. . . .

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

A rare exception among scientists, Galileo saw the unknown as a place to explore rather than as an eternal mystery controlled by the hand of God.

As long as the celestial sphere was generally regarded as the domain of the divine, the fact that mere mortals could not explain its workings could safely be cited as proof of the higher wisdom and power of God. But beginning in the sixteenth century, the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton—not to mention Maxwell, Heisenberg, Einstein, and everybody else who discovered fundamental laws of physics—provided rational explanations for an increasing range of phenomena. Little by little, the universe was subjected to the methods and tools of science, and became a demonstrably knowable place.

Then, in what amounts to a stunning yet unheralded philosophical inversion, throngs of ecclesiastics and scholars began to declare that it was the laws of physics themselves that served as proof of the wisdom and power of God.

One popular theme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the clockwork universe—an ordered, rational, predictable mechanism fashioned and run by God and his physical laws. The early telescopes, which all relied on visible light, did little to undercut that image of an ordered system. The Moon revolved around Earth. Earth and other planets rotated on their axes and revolved around the Sun. The stars shone. The nebulae floated freely in space.

Not until the nineteenth century was it evident that visible light is just one band of a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation—the band that human beings just happen to see. Infrared was discovered in 1800, ultraviolet in 1801, radio waves in 1888, X rays in 1895, and gamma rays in 1900. Decade by decade in the following century, new kinds of telescopes came into use, fitted with detectors that could see these formerly invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now astrophysicists began to unmask the true character of the universe.

Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telescopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. Our own cosmic neighborhood—the inner solar system—turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.

So the universe wants to kill us all. But let's ignore that complication for the moment.

Many, perhaps countless, questions hover at the front lines of science. In some cases, answers have eluded the best minds of our species for decades or even centuries. And in contemporary America, the notion that a higher intelligence is the single answer to all enigmas has been enjoying a resurgence. This present-day version of God of the gaps goes by a fresh name: "intelligent design." The term suggests that some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster, created or enabled all the things in the physical world that we cannot explain through scientific methods.

An interesting hypothesis.

But why confine ourselves to things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a superintelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence?

Take the human form. We eat, drink, and breathe through the same hole in the head, and so, despite Henry J. Heimlich's eponymous maneuver, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. How about drowning, the fifth leading cause? Water covers almost three-quarters of Earth's surface, yet we are land creatures—submerge your head for just a few minutes, and you die.

Or take our collection of useless body parts. What good is the pinky toenail? How about the appendix, which stops functioning after childhood and thereafter serves only as the source of appendicitis? Useful parts, too, can be problematic. I happen to like my knees, but nobody ever accused them of being well protected from bumps and bangs. These days, people with problem knees can get them surgically replaced. As for our pain-prone spine, it may be a while before someone finds a way to swap that out.

How about the silent killers? High blood pressure, colon cancer, and diabetes each cause tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. every year, but it's possible not to know you're afflicted until your coroner tells you so. Wouldn't it be nice if we had built-in biogauges to warn us of such dangers well in advance? Even cheap cars, after all, have engine gauges.

And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs—an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?

The eye is often held up as a marvel of biological engineering. To the astrophysicist, though, it's only a so-so detector. A better one would be much more sensitive to dark things in the sky and to all the invisible parts of the spectrum. How much more breathtaking sunsets would be if we could see ultraviolet and infrared. How useful it would be if, at a glance, we could see every source of microwaves in the environment, or know which radio station transmitters were active. How helpful it would be if we could spot police radar detectors at night.

Think how easy it would be to navigate an unfamiliar city if we, like birds, could always tell which way was north because of the magnetite in our heads. Think how much better off we'd be if we had gills as well as lungs, how much more productive if we had six arms instead of two. And if we had eight, we could safely drive a car while simultaneously talking on a cell phone, changing the radio station, applying makeup, sipping a drink, and scratching our left ear.

Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself. It may not be nature's default, but it's ubiquitous. Yet people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it's a good antidepressant to think so. But it's not science—not now, not in the past, not ever.

Another practice that isn't science is embracingignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who's not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers?

There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace's problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

To deny or erase the rich, colorful history of scientists and other thinkers who have invoked divinity in their work would be intellectually dishonest. Surely there's an appropriate place for intelligent design to live in the academic landscape. How about the history of religion? How about philosophy or psychology? The one place it doesn't belong is the science classroom.

If you're not swayed by academic arguments, consider the financial consequences. Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery—the frontier that drives the economies of the future—would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

"Neil deGrasse Tyson on Creationism, Celebrity, and Kids." He also talks about Christian assholes who want to stick their god fantasy into science classrooms. Four minute video.

The artist for this one was not Leonardo da Vinci.

I found two more quotes for my list of favorite quotes.

"Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand.] If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem."
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

“You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition.”
-- Carl Sagan

Pale Blue Dot - A Great Speech By Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot OFFICIAL

carlsagandotcom Published on Sep 9, 2015

As seen in 2014's COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey Written by Ann Druyan and Steven Sober

Ann Druyan Introduces Episode 1 of COSMOS: A Personal Voyage +OPENING SCENE
carlsagandotcom Published on Aug 13, 2015

In 2000, Carl Sagan's iconic and globally renowned PBS series COSMOS: A Personal Voyage was released for the first time on DVD. In this clip from that DVD box set, Sagan's longtime collaborator, wife, and COSMOS co-writer, Ann Druyan introduces new viewers to their groundbreaking and prophetic series. This video also includes the first opening scene of the episode, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean. Filmed on breathtaking Pacific Ocean cliffs near Carmel, CA. The same location was used in the 2014 FOX and NatGeo sequel- COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey, written by Ann Druyan and Steven Soter, and hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

THE PERIMETER OF IGNORANCE, A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge

"There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace's problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance."
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Please see the rest of it at Neil deGrasse Tyson: THE PERIMETER OF IGNORANCE, A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge

Several tons of quotes from numerous scientists, other people, books, and websites.

In addition to the quotes on this post please see Some quotes from the National Academy of Sciences and please see Some stuff I stole from Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair

I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too local, too provincial. The earth, he came to the earth, one of the aspects of god came to the earth mind you, and look at what's out there. It isn't in proportion.
-- Richard Feyman

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.
-- Ken Miller

There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

From the movie: You killed god sir. You have killed god.

THEORY: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.
-- National Academy of Sciences

Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip.
-- Richard Dawkins

For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.
-- The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Evolution by Sean B. Carroll

Even without fossils, we have evidence of human evolution from comparative anatomy, embryology, our vestigial traits, and even biogeography. We've learned of our fishlike embryos, our dead genes, our transitory fetal coat of hair, and our poor design, all testifying to our origins. The fossil record is really the icing on the cake.
-- Jerry Coyne

Religion is a cruel hoax sustained by miracles, fear, superstition and ignorance. Evolution is a science sustained by proven facts. Take your pick.
-- Dean Carson

The first thing to notice is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.
-- Sam Harris

Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
-- J.B.S. Haldane

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov

Should Creationism be taught in public schools?

Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial….My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they’ve got a mental problem. We can’t afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I’m concerned.
-- Mike Gravel, former Democratic United States Senator from Alaska, who served two terms from 1969 to 1981, and a former candidate in the 2008 presidential election.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.
-- Jerry Coyne

Science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.
-- New York Times

Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part. It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
-- New York Times

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. This chapter is about how we know the ages of rocks and the fossils embedded in them. It presents evidence that the timescale on which life has operated on this planet is measured not in thousands of years but in thousands of millions of years.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

ID creationism adherents believe in ID creationism because they haven't considered, or don't want to consider, the possibility that they're just retarded. Well, it's time for them to consider it.
-- Mike Toreno

It takes nothing more than a child of a few years to understand the incompatibility of understanding how the world works as opposed to essentially Santa Claus type thinking. It is a matter of honesty to admit that someone being raised from the dead is not a belief compatible with what we know of in science or that the myriad of religious beliefs from around the world are simply not square with the scientific knowledge of the day. It is rank dishonesty to pretend that science and religion are compatible while trying to backdoor tons of material as 'outside' the realm of science.
-- KevinB

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.
-- Ken Miller

Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement's critics, and there's something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It's clear that you have a cadre of attack dogs that do this work for you, and some of them seem unconstrained by standards of integrity. I can't state this strongly enough: the Discovery Institute is a dangerous cancer on the Christian intellect, both because of its unyielding commitment to dishonesty and because of its creepy mission to undermine science itself. I'd like to see you do better, but I have no such hope for your institute. It needs to be destroyed, and I will do what I can to bring that about.
http://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/2010/06/open-letter-to-stephen-meyer.html

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
-- Stephen Hawking

But, as Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.’” I weep for those children. For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents. Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing. For a parent to ignore 150 years of solid science, feeding their children lies based on theology, is to deprive those children of the wonder of the universe—a wonder based on truth rather than medieval superstition. It kills off the part of a child that most needs nurturing: her sense of wonder, and all the possibilities of life that are opened up by that wonder. How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information? Generation after generation of ignorance and religious dogmatism, all perpetuated by religously based home-schooling.
-- Jerry Coyne http://tinyurl.com/yclezr6

Humans aren't high on the evolutionary scale…there is no evolutionary scale. We aren't the pinnacle of anything.
-- PZ Myers

You know, there’s this pervasive idea in biology that I think is wrong. It goes: we humans are at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, and as you get up that tree, brain size must get bigger. But a fly is just as evolved as a human. It’s just evolved to a different niche.
-- Jeremy Niven

It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is they are opposing.
-- Richard Dawkins

The field of molecular biology provides the most detailed and convincing evidence available for biological evolution. In its unveiling of the nature of DNA and the workings of organisms at the level of enzymes and other protein molecules, it has shown that these molecules hold information about an organism’s ancestry. This has made it possible to reconstruct evolutionary events that were previously unknown and to confirm and adjust the view of events already known. The precision with which these events can be reconstructed is one reason the evidence from molecular biology is so compelling.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

Chance alone cannot explain the marvelous fit between individuals and their environment. And it doesn't. True, the raw materials for evolution--the variations between individuals--are indeed produced by chance mutations. These mutations occur willy-nilly, regardless of whether they are good or bad for the individual. But it is the filtering of that variation by natural selectionthat produces adaptations, and natural selection is manifestly notrandom. It is a powerful molding force, accumulating genes that have a greater chance of being passed on to others, and in so doing making individuals even better able to cope with their environment. It is, then, the unique combination of mutation and selection--chance and lawfulness--that tells us how organisms become adapted.
-- Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. ... This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honored and practiced by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.
-- Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man, 1871

If anything is absolutely, rock-bottom true, it’s that life evolved, beginning about 4 billion years ago, and that the creation myth of Genesis is completely wrong.
-- Jerry Coyne

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context -- which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents, and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word 'evolution' systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into 'change over time'.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.
-- Emmett F. Fields

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and mantenees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips ... continue the list as long as long as desired. That didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.
-- The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Your comments are evidence yet again, though it isn't needed, that religions only survive because of the invincible ignorance of their practitioners. Not just ignorance of biology, and physics, and geology, and cosmology, but ignorance of history, and of anthropology, and sociology and psychology. An ignorance that enables the individual member at one particluar time and place to imagine that they, uniquely, have the truth, and that all of the other billions of humans who live now, and lived in the past, didn't. What extraordinary arrogance and ignorance. Encouraged, indeed demanded, by the leaders of every religious cult, for various motives that have nothing to do with any supposed reality of an imaginary second life. And everything to do with power, and wealth, and misogyny, and xenophobia.
-- David Horton

Over the past quarter-century, poll after poll has revealed that nearly half of all Americans flatly reject evolution, many clinging to the ancient superstition that the earth was created only 6,000 years ago, complete with all existing species. But as Richard Dawkins shows in his splendid new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the theory of evolution is supported by at least as much evidence as is the germ theory of disease--heaps of it, and from many areas of biology. So why is it contemptible to reject germ theory but socially acceptable to reject evolutionary theory?

One answer is religion. Unlike germ theory, the idea of evolution strikes at the heart of human ego, suggesting that we were not the special object of God's attention but were made by the same blind and mindless process of natural selection that also built ferns, fish and rabbits. Another answer is ignorance: most Americans are simply unaware of the multifarious evidence that makes evolution more than "just a theory," and don't even realize that a scientific theory is far more than idle speculation.
-- Jerry Coyne

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.
-- Theodosius Dobzhansky

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.
-- Michael Shermer

Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip.
-- Richard Dawkins http://tinyurl.com/l4n2ar

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins

I should love to have everybody taught about evolution from a fairly early age, because it is so important, so exciting. It answers so many questions and mysteries; it solves so many problems. Until you know about it, you're wandering around on this Earth looking at trees and birds and flowers, not knowing why any of them is there. Evolution is the answer to that riddle, so you're not really a whole person if you don't know where you come from and why you exist. And it's not difficult. It's not like relativity, it's not like quantum theory – it's something teachable to fairly young children.
-- Richard Dawkins

Darwin anticipated problems with his theory. Modern science has
answered them. Evolution by Natural Selection has been triumphantly
vindicated as fact.
-- Richard Dawkins

So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
-- Ken Miller at the Dover trial http://tinyurl.com/2llumn

In October 2008 a group of about sixty American high-school teachers met at the Center for Science Education of Emory University, in Atlanta. Some of the horror stories they had to tell deserve wide attention. One teacher reported that students 'burst into tears' when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed 'No!' when he began talking about evolution in class. Another reported that pupils demanded to know why they had to learn about evolution, given that it was 'only a theory'. Yet another teacher described how 'churches train students to come to school with specific questions to ask to sabotage my lessons'.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

Now, nearly 150 years later, we can see. We no longer look at Nature's diversity "as a savage looks at a ship." From the new DNA record, the evidence of the workings of the evolutionary process abounds. But many people--a great many--either do not see what scientists see, or do not believe what scientists have concluded.

I have borrowed the title of this chapter from the wonderful book Seeing and Believing by Richard Panek, about the invention of the telescope and how it changed our perception of the sky and our place in the universe. Like Darwin, Galileo's observations and ideas were rejected by authorities who had no use for new evidence or ideas. But, eventually, the observable evidence overwhelmed ideological resistance. For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.

With the facts on evolution's side, how can this doubt and denial persist, or even be growing, here at the outset of the twenty-first century?
-- "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.
-- Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences - Department Position on Evolution and "Intelligent Design"

Evolution is both a scientific fact and a scientific theory. Evolution is a fact in the sense that life has changed through time. In nature today, the characteristics of species are changing, and new species are arising. The fossil record is the primary factual evidence for evolution in times past, and evolution is well documented by further evidence from other scientific disciplines, including comparative anatomy, biogeography, genetics, molecular biology, and studies of viral and bacterial diseases. Evolution is also a theory – an explanation for the observed changes in life through Earth history that has been tested numerous times and repeatedly confirmed.
-- Paleontological Society

While modern biologists constantly study and deliberate the patterns, mechanisms, and pace of evolution, they agree that all living things share common ancestors. The fossil record and the diversity of extant organisms, combined with modern techniques of molecular biology, taxonomy, and geology, provide exhaustive examples of and powerful evidence for current evolutionary theory. Genetic variation, natural selection, speciation, and extinction are well-established components of modern evolutionary theory. Explanations are constantly modified and refined as warranted by new scientific evidence that accumulates over time, which demonstrates the integrity and validity of the field. Scientists have firmly established evolution as an important natural process.
-- National Association of Biology Teachers

It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science ... In summary, the [school board's] disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text [Of Pandas and People] as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.
-- Judge Jones' decision in the 2005 Dover trial

Fortunately, there is, however, an altogether new way of deciphering species' relationships. It also relies on DNA, but rather than being based on the degree of sequence similarity, it looks for the presence and absence of certain landmarks in specific places in species DNA. These landmarks are produced by accidental insertions of junk DNA sequences near genes. Particular chunks of junk DNA, call long interspersed elements (LINES) and short interspersed elements (SINES), are very easy to detect. Once a SINE or LINE is inserted, there is no active mechanism for removing it. The insertion of these elements marks a gene in a species, and is then inherited by all species descended from it. They are really perfect tracers of genealogy. These insertion events are very rare; therefore, their presence in the same place in the DNA of two species can be explained only by the species sharing a common ancestor. The inheritance of variable markers in DNA is the same principle applied to paternity testing in humans. By surveying the distribution of a number of elements that arose at different times in different ancestors, biologists have sufficient forensic evidence to determine species' kinship beyond any doubt.
-- "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll

My point here is that there is anincredible amount of evidence for evolution, far more than any one person can digest, and that it is a vital field, still growing and still producing new results. All those papers don't get published unless they contain some new observation, a new experiment, a new test of the idea…and evolution has weathered them all.
-- PZ Myers

The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions being made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it's wonderful when someone says "I'm willing Lord, to do whatever you want me to do". But since there are no actual gods talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and recognize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the millions of their fellow followers.
-- Bill Maher

Q. So what you're testifying here is that modern genetics and molecular biology actually support evolutionary theory?

A. They support it in great detail. And the closer that we can get to looking at the details of the human genome, the more powerful the evidence has become.
-- Ken Miller at the Dover trial http://tinyurl.com/2llumn

An essential element in the teaching of science is the encouragement of students and teachers to critically appraise the evidence for notions being taught as science. The Society states unequivocally that the dogmatic teaching of notions such as Creationism within a science curriculum stifles the development of critical thinking patterns in the developing mind and seriously compromises the best interests of objective public education. This could eventually hamper the advancement of science and technology as students take their places as leaders of future generations.
— Geological Society of Australia

The Hominidae (anglicized hominids, also known as great apes) form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: chimpanzee, gorillas, humans, and orangutans. -- Wikipedia

"Yet Darwin looked beyond the obvious, suggesting--and supporting with copious evidence--two ideas that forever dispelled the idea of deliberate design. Those ideas were evolution and natural selection. He was not the first to think of evolution--several before him, including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, floated the idea that life had evolved. But Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science."
-- Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
-- Stephen Jay Gould