Thomas Huxley Quotes

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

The opposition to teaching evolution is, of course, almost always given a religious reason. That may usually be its real basis, but I think it is often a mask, perhaps unconscious, for underlying anti-intellectualism or antiscientism.

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.

It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists.

The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

But whereas skepticism and uncertainty have always been the heart and soul of science, confidence and certainty are the coin of the realm in much of today’s public discourse. Unquestioning confidence is deeply troubling for the scientific community because it is not the currency we trade in, and it has led people in America and around the world to question scientific enterprise itself. We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

To be labeled a 'science-denier' in 2017 often just means you've upset someone who insists on teaching strict, Darwinian orthodoxy in schools or who advocates particular climate legislation or who supports ethically fraught research on embryos.

Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

People need to understand the basics of evolution if they are going to reject it—otherwise, they are not contributing anything productive to modern society.

We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

It was an effort to include intelligent design and treat it as science, disparaging evolution along the way. That will not stand.

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

We need to have real science, and real science doesn't happen under the hand of lobbyists with a conflict of interest. So get the revolving door done and over with and get the big money out of politics.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

I have this real moron thing I do? It's called thinking.

There is no real scientific debate over what is happening; of course there is debate over exactly how it is going to play out in the decades ahead, because this is a large experiment that we haven't done before, and no one knows precisely how one can ever precisely predict what effects this heat will have. But all the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.

Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.

This white woman came up to me, and I'm thinking, WOW. When I was a kid, she would have been robbed and raped and left for dead. This is a real strange scenario, and I just wanted to cry. I'm like, "Who am I? Where's my heritage?

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us.

Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man.

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.

If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.

He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.

I cheated a lot, because I just couldn't sit and do homework. I usually sat next to someone extremely smart.