Quotes by Australian Authors - Page 90

But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.
Christine Kenneally
Scientific literacy is a rather noble ideal. Achieving it, however, is problematic thanks to our tribal brains. If science is equated with knowledge, then communicating facts, figures, and theories should be a way to increase the public’s level of engagement with it. However, this boils down to the authority distributing the information. Who do you listen to when there are conflicting sources? Our brain’s desire for certainty and its tendency to evaluate new information based on social clues means anybody painted as an expert, who sounds confident, shares our values and flatters our expectations, is more likely to win over our opinion...regardless of the scientific merits of their argument.
Mike McRae
Sadly, because of our tribal brains, science carries a hefty cost. Treasured ideas that are loved by the community may be left behind, unable to compete with conflicting observations. Admired heroes may be found to have been mistaken. Years of hard work can amount to nothing thanks to a single observation, making a lifetime of effort seem like a waste of time. For our tribal brain, the philosopher’s toolbox is full of double-edged knives, capable of cutting away our hopes with the myths.
Mike McRae
Fatigue fatigue is when you're tired of being tired.
Michael McGirr
A woman needed half her leg amputated after she slipped and broke the leg as she was cleaning her bath while she was still asleep. Not even the pain of a broken bone woke her and the angle at which she fell cut off circulation to the leg, killing the limb. When she finally awoke, she was close to multi-organ collapse.
Michael McGirr
People with jutting jaws are more likely to have open throats and hence be less susceptible to snoring and sleep apnoea. Chris Worsnop points out that superheroes such as Superman and Batman are often drawn with strong jutting jaws, a feature which, since the time we lived in caves, has been seen as attractive to women. The reason women may be attracted to jutting jaws may have nothing to do with jutting biceps or jutting anything else; it simply makes it less likely they will have to put up with snoring.
Michael McGirr
Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?
Kate Grenville
Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they or their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.
Greg Egan
[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.
Christine Kenneally
At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.
Christine Kenneally
Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who producesthe sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with mostmammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it forgranted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn’t “in” their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn’t in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat’s developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male “mothering” the infant, in much the same way that females do. Feminism: 1. Sexual selection: nil.
Cordelia Fine
Humans should be permanently under development.
Graeme Simsion
The mind you use to try to see your true self does not recognise if it has never seen. Once you stop looking within and realise you are the one doing the looking to recognise yourself, the mind will understand.
Dee-Anne Hayes
Mother Nature continues in motion while your mind is segmented with probabilities. Remembering your night dreams shows exactly this - fleeting scenes of experience with nothing in between. Dee-anne Hayes
Dee-Anne Hayes
... despite the profound advances in molecular biology oer the past half-century, we still do not understand what life is, how it relates to the inanimate world, and how it emerged.
Addy Pross
The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers.To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!
Michael Denton
The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.
Cordelia Fine
Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.
Paul Davies
The population explosion is the primary force behind the remaining six groups of critical global events [diminishing land resources, diminishing water resources, the destruction of the atmosphere, the approaching energy crisis, social decline, and conflicts/increasing killing power].
Ron Nielsen
One day, scientists will overtake LIGHT and crash into the DARKNESS.
Paul McDermott
A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business Schoolfound that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annualincome. -- from "Eugene
Greg Egan
It would seem that the scientific revolution involved not just a progressive transformation of scientific theory, but also a transformation in what were considered to be the observable facts!
Alan F. Chalmers
Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.
Michael Denton
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.
Michael Denton
In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.
Michael Denton
One of the biggest obstacles to making a start on climate change is that it has become a cliche before it has even been understood
Tim Flannery
The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.
Michael Denton
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them
William Lawrence Bragg
In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.
Cordelia Fine
As long as scepticism is based on a sound understanding of science it is invaluable, for that is how science progresses. But poor criticism can lead those who are unfamiliar with the science involved into doubting everything about climate change predictions.
Tim Flannery
I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
John C. Eccles
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
William Lawrence Bragg
To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.
Peter Singer
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James
I still didn’t turn. Instead, I just listened really hard. I couldn’t tell where he was standing anymore, but I could sense that he was still there somewhere. Well obviously … because he didn’t exactly jump out of the window.
Jaymin Eve
Yeah, that’s what Jeffrey said too. Oh, wait … Jeffrey said something about a Sacred Abil and the Trophy of Stavlini, or Stavriti, or Stav … something.”“Staviti?” The hysteria in Emmy’s voice was definitely becoming prominent now. “The Trophy of Staviti? You stole the Trophy of Staviti?”I clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to muffle her shriek. “No!” I answered reflexively. “Or yes. Kind of. Maybe. Why?”She gave a muffled answer, and I realised that I was still holding my hand over her mouth. I pulled away, allowing her to speak again.“You don’t know who Staviti is, Willa? Seriously? You couldn’t pay attention in class even for that much?”“I knew it sounded familiar,” I grumbled, feeling defensive. “Is it the god of … um … food or something?
Jaymin Eve
I choked on the air I'd just sucked in and swung around in disbelief. "What did you just say?""Me and the whole PD heard about your wet bra, so I'm assuming your panties are wet too.
Rachel Brookes
You know, Mac,”Cadmus said still looking out the window. “We may have to work on the way we tell our story …apparently it’s not amusing enough.” “I’ll try to include a joke between ‘he bled to death’and ‘the city burned’.”Machaon responded tersely.
Sulari Gentill
That’s probably the most sincere thing that I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth.”Logan lowered his eyes to Tate’s hand. “Now, that’s not true. I was very sincere this morning when I told you that I loved sucking your—”“Don’t ruin it,” Tate interrupted.
Ella Frank
Can you sharpen this for me, please?”Logan leaned across the table and took the pencil from him. “You want me to play with your pencil, Tate?”“Hilarious. The sharpener is right by you. You just have to pick it up and slide it in.”As soon as the words left his mouth and Logan’s quirked into an arrogant line, Tate bit his tongue.“Really? Did you really just say that to me?”Feeling more comfortable than ever with Logan and this group, Tate shrugged and nodded. Time to give it to Logan as good as he gives.“Yeah. Is there a problem? You just line it up...and slide it in.”“You know, Tate—”“Don't do it.” Tate cut him off as he moved his foot, the one he’d had sitting between Logan’s feet all night, so his shin bumped Logan’s calf.“Do what?”“Say something dirty. I know you're dying to, but just sharpen the pencil.”Logan picked up the sharpener and made a big show of inserting the tip in the hole.“Jesus,” Shelly muttered from beside Logan. “I thought Rachel and Cole were bad.
Ella Frank
Glancing at the bottle of tequila in Tate’s hand, Logan questioned much more calmly than he felt, “How full was that?”Tate lifted the quarter-empty bottle and shrugged. “Unopened. Why?
Ella Frank
She was smart like that, and lucky like that, and people loved the hell out of her. They didn’t love the hell out of me; they ran the hell away from me. It wasn’t like I was a bad person or anything, I just … had a lot of accidents. I didn’t mean accidents like I ate glue and then peed myself on a regular basis. I just tripped more than usual, and accidently set things on fire more than what would be considered ‘normal’. I got kicked out of the village school only one moon-cycle before graduation for accidently making one of the teachers bald. How do you accidently make someone bald? That’s a good question. All you really need is a bucket of warm tar to accidently toss onto the back of their head. How do you get a bucket of warm tar? You don’t go looking for it or anything—or at least I didn’t. It was just sitting on the road outside the school and I thought I should carry it inside to ask what it was.
Jaymin Eve
Go to sleep, dweller-baby. I’ll kill Elowin as soon as we find her.” He didn’t sound like he was kidding. Each word was low and laced with truth.“Next time, just say like … sleep well, or something normal,” I said. “Not go to sleep, I’ll be murdering someone in no time. It doesn’t sound as comforting as you think it does.
Jaymin Eve
One of the multitudes of exboyfriends had been a country music fan and left Gemma with an unfortunate passion for Tammy Wynette. It was like, Cat thought, he’d given her herpes.
Liane Moriarty
I once had a patient who was convinced that his head was full of sea water and a crab lived inside. When I asked him what happened to his brain he told me that aliens had sucked it out with a drinking straw."It is better this way," he insisted. "Now there's more room for the crab.
Michael Robotham
Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, “Listen, asshole. We’re not dying. We have shit to do.
Krystal Sutherland
Gus leaned back in his chair, appearing satisfied."Good," he said. "Cause Maggie's all the nightmare I can take."I smiled. "Gus, I never knew you dreamed of me." He gave me a one-fingered salute
Jessica Shirvington
Could I pick some flowers for Miranda?’ I asked.‘You cannot take these flowers,’ said Zoran. ‘They belong to the government.
Doug MacLeod
But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.
Kate Morton
Why is she afraid?" he asked. "She's not Anjin-san. Just a little nervous. Please excuse her. She's never seen a foreigner close to before." "Tell her when the moon's full, barbarians sprout horns and fire comes out of our mouths like dragons.
James Clavell
You thought I didn’t notice the way you two looked at each other? I may be old but I’m not blind. I remember thatfeeling. The spark, the electricity... ”I had to interject before I got the unabridged version of Anjali Does Mumbai.
Nicola Marsh
I just don't know what I'd do without a brain, Simone!" I say. "I mean, what's a person without one?
Randa Abdel-Fattah
Eating be eating, b'ain't it, Birdie?''Nay, Uncle Bear: In Caermelor, at the Royal Court, they be so-oh, so much more advanced than anywhere else. 'Tis not done to wipe your fingers on your hair or the tablecloth, or belch, or speak with your mouth full of food, or scratch, or pick your teeth at table. Ye have to use little forks to pick up the food. Ye not allowed to pour wine for your betters or for yourself, but to wait for them to deign to pour it for ye, if they be feeling generous. And the carving of the meats must be done a certain way, and as for the toasts-it would take ye a whole day just to learn the complications.'Takes the fun out of eating,' observed Sianadh.
Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Is he about to kiss me? Did he eat garlic too or was I the only one? 'Cause if Ric didn't eat garlic then my breath's gonna stink and he'll think... Oh for fuck sake, shut up internal dialogue!
Zathyn Priest
As it happens, I’m a terrible dancer. Bears are simply not made for dancing. We’re much better at sitting and sleeping and singing. But there are humans who catch bears and force us to dance. It’s agony. And there are other humans who pay to watch us.’Hannah sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right to distrust humans.’‘And that is why I must eat you,’ said the bear forlornly. ‘For the benefit of the entire bear population of the world. I’m awfully sorry about this.’‘That’s all right.’ Hannah shrugged her shoulders. ‘Is there any point in my trying to run away?’‘None. We bears may not be able to dance but we are experts when it comes to chasing things.’‘What if I climb a tree?’‘I’ll climb up after you, or push the tree over. It all depends on what sort of tree you choose to climb. Either way, you’ll end up eaten.’‘So be it,’ said Hannah. ‘How should I prepare myself?’‘I beg your pardon?’‘Will you eat me with my clothes on?’‘Of course. Otherwise it would be bad manners.
Doug MacLeod
I feel like I’m going to die,’ he says.‘Could we talk for a few minutes before you die?’‘Only if you do it quietly.’‘I met this girl last night. I need your advice.’‘Come back later.’‘No. You might be dead.
Doug MacLeod
No one here is allowed to die without my permission.
Doug MacLeod
I’m not scared any more,’ said Midge. ‘Thank you, Kevin. Sometimes you can be very kind.’‘Yes,’ said Kevin. ‘And if you tell that to any of the other trolls I will pull off your nose and feed it to a bear.
Doug MacLeod
Don't say anything. Just act cool," I whispered.Mavkel started to shiver."Like this?" it asked."No, I mean act calm."Mavkel stopped shivering.
Alison Goodman
Best friends one, and now we have almost nothing to say to each other. It was interesting, how he had joined those guys and I just stayed on my own. I didn't like it or dislike it. It was just funny that things had turned out that way.
Markus Zusak