P. Z. Myers' explanation for how this principle means we cannot look to supernatural explanations for our origins, because there is no reason to think we are an exception to the rules of the universe.

Clifford Pickover on the phenomenon of many scientists making the same discovery at once, because new knowledge has allowed them to see further over the horizon to see the same things.

Barry C. Smith describes how our senses collaborate, our hearing with our sight to read lips and our sense of smell with taste to enhance one another.

W. Tecumseh Fitch describes the link between infant vocalizations and the ability of humans to vocalize extensively. This links to Chomsky's speech-center of the human brain.

Terrence Sejnowski on the incredible three-pound universe.

Daniel C. Dennett adds a cognitive tool to help understand how evolution works over time--by recognizing that evolution keeps trying, reproduction is a cycle.

Dan Sperber on why we like rounded numbers.

Dan Sperber describes how our many human-culture-produced supernatural beings are actually quite similar and predictable.

Frank Wilczek describes one of the great questions of science, how the difficult taks of learning something leads to the learned easy of later doing it.

Daniel Goleman explains a concept for thinking about how our lives contribute to the increase of entropy in our biosphere.

Joel Gold on the exercise of fantasy and imagination to unlock knew ideas.

V. S. Ramachandran on a fascinating experiment involving combining dead bacteria with live to produce new bacteria.

Keith Devlin explains why the accuracy of tests and measurments must take into account the base rate for the phenomenon.

Nick Bostrom on the possibility of looking for scientific concept generators, similar to the way Conway's Game of Life is a pattern generator, rather than looking for random scientific problems to solve.

Scott D. Sampson's beautiful passage on the interconnectedness of ourselves and the universe. We are a process in the background flow of the universe.

Gregory Paul on how conversations are prone to falshoods and equating opinions with facts.

Matt Ridley observes that isolated societies collapse, while networked societies succeed.

Don Tapscott on why you should let your kids teach you things.

Helen Fisher on the many chemicals that influence our behavior.

Clay Shirky on what is also known as the "long-tail effect" or "90% of everything is crap" effect.

Jonathan Haidt explains our our proclivity to help one another makes us a kind of "superorganism."

Marcel Kinsbourne explains how recognizing all human beings as part of our in-group can promote inter-marriage, which will diversify our genes and improve our overall health and well-being.

Giulio on how this technique was used to estimate the power of a secret nuclear blast from a photo.

Jaron Lanier describes a game you can play with google translate, transforming a sentence through a variety of languages back to its original to see what is produced.

Terrence Sejnowski on how a moment of time is a subjective experience that grows longer the more novelty is packed into it.

Michael Shermer on how understanding the world in terms of emergence can help us better understand it.

David Eagleman on how each species of animal senses only a small portion of the world, and assumes that small fraction is the entire world.

Emanuel Derman on the habit of attributing properties of inanimate things to human beings, like PET scans to emotion, or IQ to intelligence. Like making a digital representation of an analog system.

Nicholas Carr on how the flood of information causes us to remember less, weaking our critical thinking.

Rudy Rucker on why our brains are like the weather, so complex that only the actual system can run the computation.

Jason Zweig describes how new experiences prompt new associations.

Garrett Lisi explains how the stress caused by many of our fears of statistically-unlikely events is more likely to kill us.

Stuart Firestein explains why naming is not explaining.

Nigel Goldenfeld explains why the simplistic explanations for market movements so popular in the news media are also so ridiculous.

Jonah Lehrer describes a characteristic of children who are later successful in life. They have much better self-control early in life, and they accomplish this by strategically allocating their attention elsewhere to avoid breaking the rules.

Gary Marcus describes how human memory is haphazard, context-specific. We can't retrieve a specific detail easily, but we can if we are in the right context to trigger its retrieval.

John Tooby describes a past when you were more likely to die from seeing a physician and likens it to economics and other forecasters who do no better than chance.

John Tooby on how causation is a way we simplify the world to more easily understand it, but it can also over-simplify.

Samuel Barondes insightful observation.

Gino Segre on the importance and validity of "thought-experiments," using Galileo's disproof of objects falling at different rates as an example.

Timo Hannay observes that we cannot experiment with classrooms and prisons because finding one experiment works means another didn't, creating winners and losers and offending our sense of justice.

Roger Schank describes a world where we are all collecting evidence to test various hypotheses.

Stewart Brand describes the state of our world, engineered by microbes and ourselves as the vehicles for their propagation in many cases.

Sean Carroll argues that our existence and our intelligence is the product of nature's algorithms. Life holds the meaning we give it.

Marcelo Gleiser's argument that the many favorable factors that produce life on Earth mean life could be very rare in the Universe.

Douglas T. Kenrick explains how our senses are bombarded, so we filter. If we could not filter, we would become incapacitated.

David Brook's relating Benoit Mandelbrot's experience measuring the British coast.

Susan Fiske on the truth of assertions and opinions as being testable.

Sam Harris on mindfulness in the many religious traditions.

Martin Seligman's mneumonic.

Donald Hoffman on how our sensory perception of the world is like a computer desktop, a representation of things, not how things actually are. We must remember the difference.

Alison Gopnik on how the father of the computer realized machines could do the work of women "computers," and how much of hte human brain was like a computer.