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 ...
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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...
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Arguing that the ability of science to admit what it doesn't know and adapt it thinking to new evidence demonstrates the greatest humility.