What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the certainty that DNA is fundamentally tied to inheritance.
Sam Harris expresses strong confidence in the established scientific understanding that DNA is essential for genetic inheritance. He highlights the improbability of drastically changing this foundational concept in biology, reinforcing the view that DNA's role in inheritance is not only significant but virtually undeniable.
In practice
In a scientific paper discussing genetic research.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.
I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean.
Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you.
Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.
This investigation has yielded an unanticipated result that reaction of cyanic acid with ammonia gives urea, a noteworthy result in as much as it provides an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal, substance from inorganic substances.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.