#speculation

The first and most important reason for its elimination is the unquestioned fact that evolution is not a science; it is a hypothesis only, a speculation. ↗

— William Bell Riley

#evolution #fact #first #hypothesis #important

I'm aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me. ↗

— Cristiano Ronaldo

#always #aware #circumstances #i #me

Gout produces calculus in the kidney... the patient has frequently to entertain the painful speculation as to whether gout or stone be the worst disease. Sometimes the stone, on passing, kills the patient, without waiting for the gout. ↗

— Thomas Sydenham

#disease #entertain #frequently #gout #kidney

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#brain #conjecture #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#conclusion-before-evidence #confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism

We've left the moment. It's gone. We're somewhere else now, and that's okay. We've still go that other moment with us somewhere, deep in our memory, seeping into our DNA. And when our cells get scattered, whenever that happens, this moment will still exist in them. Those cells might be the building block of something new. A planet or a star or a sunflower, a baby. Maybe even a cockroach. Who knows? Whatever it is, it'll be a part of us, this thing right here and now, and we'll be a part of it. And if it's a cockroach? Well, that will be the happiest ****ing cockroach on the planet. I can tell you that. ↗

— Libba Bray

#happiness #memories #puzzles #afterlife

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

Hasn’t stopped us before. And besides, if they wanted to kill us, we’d be dead by now and would be having an entirely different conversation. I wonder if I’d still be mad at you, or if we would talk in words or pictures. Maybe in smells. That would be cool.” -Janco ↗

— Maria V. Snyder

#afterlife-speculation #funny-and-random #funny-but-true #funny-quotes #humor

I've been to the other side...You're dead there, too. ↗

— Courtney Kirchoff

#death-and-dying #death