• "If a complex adaptive system is ever in equilibrium, it's probably dead." -John Holland
  • "The nucleic acids invented human beings in order to be able to reproduce themselves even on the Moon." Sol Spiegelman, quoted in Manfred Eigen's _Steps Towards Life_, p. 124.
  • "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library." Daniel Dennett, _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_, p. 346.
  • "Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not passive, receptive, relaxing times - although such experiences can be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, _Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience_, p. 3
  • "According to a large-scale Gallup survey takin in 1976, 40 percent of North Americans said they were "very happy", as opposed to 20 percent of Europeans, 18 percent of Africans, and only 7 percent of Far Eastern respondents. On the other hand, another survey conducted only two years earlier indicated that the personal happiness rating of U.S. citizens was about the same as that of Cubans and Egyptians" _Flow_, p. 82
  • "What we found was that when people were pursuing leisure activities that were expensive in terms of the outside resources required - activities that demanded expensive equipment, or electricity, or other forms of energy measured in BTUs, such as power boating, driving, or watching television - they were significantly less happy than when involved in inexpensive leisure." _Flow_, p 99.
  • "To categorize is human, to distribute, divine." - Terrence Sejnowksi, as quoted in William Calvin's _The Cerebral Symphony_.
  • "Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing, in accurately formulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly fine-grained conception of what is called reality." - Francois Jacob, as quoted in William Calvin's _The Cerebral Symphony_.
  • "The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. ... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage ..." Albert Einstein, as quoted in _The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field_, by Jacques Hadamard
  • "the history of the social sciences stands as a monument to the proposition that testing falsifiable predictions and acquiring scientifically significant knowledge are not synonymous." - Donald Symons, page 152 of _The Adapted Mind_ (ed. by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby)
  • "the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves. One of the most insidious but also widespread errors regarding IQ, especially among people who have high IQs, is the assumption that another person's intelligence can be inferred from casual interactions. Many people conclude that if they see someone who is sensitive, humorous, and talks fluently, the person must surely have an above-average IQ.

    This identification of IQ with attractive human qualities in general is unfortunate and wrong. Statistically, there is often a modest correlation with such qualities. But modest correlations are of little use in sizing up other individuals one by one." - _The Bell Curve_, pp 20-21.

  • "All the claims about a language instinct and other mental modules are claims about the commonalities among all normal people. They have virtually nothing to with possible genetic differences between people. One reason is that, to a scientist interested in how complex biological systems work, differences between individuals are so _boring_! Imagine what a dreary science of language we would have if instead of trying to figure out how people put words together to express their thoughts, researchers had begun by developing a Language Quotient (LQ) scale, and busied themselves by measuring thousands of people's relative language skills. It would be like asking how lungs work and being told that some people have better lungs than others" - Steven Pinker, _The Language Instinct_, pp 428-429.