Saturday, 17-May-2008 14:13:44 CDT
Quote of the Day:


If you can survive death, you can probably survive anything.






	My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or

even that they were always wrong.  Rather, I believe that science must be

understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of

robots programmed to collect pure information.  I also present this view as

an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on

the alter of human limitations.

	I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often

in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it.  Galileo was not shown

the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion.  He had

threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal

stability:  the static world order with planets circling about a central

earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord.  But the

Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology.  They had no choice; the

earth really does revolve about the sun.

		-- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"