18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Intelligence and Nutrition
Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding
poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our
grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence
farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read
for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and
the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York
Public Schools. They followed prescriptions on childhood nutrition
recommended by the US Department of Agriculture as if they ...When confronted with malnutrition, the body deprives the brain of development.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Ann Druyan on the Humility of Science
I think that science tolerates the unknown in a way that religion doesn't. My argument is not with people who search for god. My argument is with people who feel that our understanding of god is completed. And those are the people who make so much of our existence on this planet such a hell, because they really think that they have the right to kill other people, to hurt them, because of what they understand god's will to be. That's a very destructive thing.
So science... Science is--the who...Arguing that the ability of science to admit what it doesn't know and adapt it thinking to new evidence demonstrates the greatest humility.