Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Interpretation
Skepticism promotes rational thinking and helps combat irrational beliefs, which is essential for maintaining social decency.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould highlights the importance of skepticism as a tool for reason. He argues that skepticism acts as a defense against organized irrationality, advocating for a rational approach to social and civic matters, ultimately contributing to the decency of human interactions. By applying skepticism, individuals can question dogmas and misinformation, fostering a more thoughtful and principled society.
In practice
In a debate about climate change, one might quote Gould to emphasize the importance of skepticism in evaluating scientific claims.
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.
Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
I have always been ahead of my time.
It is the mind that makes the man, and our vigour is in our immortal soul.
Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.
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