Quotes By Michael Shermer

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

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.

Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.

When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.

But the power of science lies in open publication, which, with the rise of the Internet, is no longer constrained by the price of paper.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

One, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.