Before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.
Interpretation
Equality must be established before discussing genetic disparities.
Neil Degrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of creating equal opportunities for all individuals before delving into the complexities of genetic differences. The underlying idea is that without a level playing field, discussions about genetics can perpetuate inequalities rather than foster understanding and progress.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about education reform to emphasize the need for equal chances for students.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
When the problem [quantum chromodynamics] is finally solved, it will all be by imagination. Then there will be some big thing about the great way it was done. But it's simple -it will all be by imagination, and persistence.
A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
The edifice of science not only requires material, but also a plan. Without the material, the plan alone is but a castle in the air-a mere possibility; whilst the material without a plan is but useless matter.
Almost any questions can be answered,cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that's he way to answer them - not by arguments around a table
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.