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.
Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.
If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
Those reformers who preach against image-worship, or what they denounce as idolatry - to them I say "Brothers, if you are fit to worship God-without-form discarding all external help, do so, but why do you condemn others who cannot do the same?"
Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual.
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
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