#analogy

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BC, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#evolution #human-history #science #age

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#obfuscation #science

I am lost without my Boswell. [Sherlock Holmes on Dr. Watson.] ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#boswell #chronicler #john-watson #sherlock-holmes #sidekicks

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator. ↗

— Susan Blackmore

#analogy #biggest #biggest mistakes #concept #extend

I think it's absolutely clear that the fiscal path we are on is not sustainable, and for me, the best analogy is these deficits are like a cancer, and over time they will destroy the country from within. ↗

— Erskine Bowles

#analogy #best #cancer #clear #country

There is an analogy between conservation and education reform. The coalition around education reform is the biggest bipartisan thing going in this state right now. We need to recapture the big bipartisan spirit for conservation. ↗

— Rob McKenna

#around #between #big #biggest #bipartisan

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#humor #science #humor

As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#resentment #bad

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#independence #miracle #nationality #physical #political