In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that scientific facts are those that have been extensively confirmed, and that unlikely possibilities should not be given equal weight in scientific education.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote highlights the importance of scientific consensus and the need for evidence-based reasoning in education. He argues that while it is theoretically possible for unlikely events to occur, such as apples rising instead of falling, educators should focus on established facts that have been rigorously tested and confirmed, as presenting improbable possibilities alongside well-established scientific principles can mislead students about the nature of scientific inquiry and understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a science classroom to illustrate the nature of scientific inquiry.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
If our species is to survive, our future will probably require outposts beyond our own planet.
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them.
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
We need to start thinking about the future of food if we are going to feed 9 billion people in a way that does not destroy our environment.
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