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Guy P. Harrison
61 quotes
“Some museums are blatant trophy rooms designed to show off only the best of ourselves. This is a good thing, too. We need it. A great art museum, for example, reassures me that, no matter what comes, humankind has not been a total waste of atoms.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The crucial ever-present factor in 2020 was critical thinking. Those who thought well were less likely to tumble into the rabbit holes of QAnon, COVID is a hoax, 5-G towers help spread the virus, racism is scientific, hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, demon sperm is a problem, tracking devices are in vaccines, mass election fraud, etc. The ability and willingness to lean toward evidence and logic rather than side with blind trust and emotion was the key metric behind the madness.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mozart's music on a smartphone can't redeem or compensate for our lust for the ludicrous. Suckers for empty promises, false hopes, and pseudoscientific babble, we are our own worst enemies. Few people take the time to learn how brains process sensory input in misleading ways and how subconscious biases influence conscious thinking. The result is a global population teeming with easy targets for digitized nonsense and deception.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The basic understanding of evolution that I carry around in my head enhances my life. I’ve done night dives in the Caribbean, 130 feet down, and there were moments when I might have felt like an astronaut visiting some alien planet filled with exotic life. But I knew better. I was home and all the weird and wonderful lifeforms around me were family. The magnificence and importance of nature are clarified and amplified in light of the awareness of shared ancestors and a common origin. I understand that I’m inside the big beautiful blur of life that surrounds our world. And that makes the ride even more amazing.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s the 21st century and still we have no universally agreed upon definition of life. It seems the universe does not care about our desire for tidy categories and tight descriptions. Our intellectual comfort is irrelevant to reality. When it comes to life, gray zones and blurry boundaries abound. This is bizarre considering life has been on our planet for more than 3.5 billion years and it’s all around us now. Life saturates Earth’s surface zone, from more than a mile deep in the crust to the stratosphere miles above. Its diversity and overall success are staggering, difficult to comprehend. For example, some scientists estimate that there are more than one trillion species alive right now. In total, Earth may have hosted more than 100 trillion species so far. Life is no stranger to us. And yet, what is it?”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Isaac Newton would be the easy answer [for greatest scientist ever]. But I’ll go with a hominin, probably two million years or so ago, who first confronted fire like a scientist. He or she observed the flames, thought about it, formulated an hypothesis, experimented perhaps, and then came up with a theory of fire. That person, so long ago, was doing science. That person approached fire, a dangerous phenomenon, and dared to control it. That was science in action. And it changed us forever. With fire in our minds and torches in our hands, we were no longer prey, no longer lost in the darkness of every night. If we one day spread our intelligence throughout the universe, it will all trace back to that hominin and that moment.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Good thinking and science are the fundamental prerequisites to building a better world for ourselves and the life we share it with. So much that harms us, so much of our pain is self-inflicted and unnecessary, the result of irrational fears and misperceptions. Most people on Earth right now do not know who we are, how we got here, how we depend on countless lifeforms all around us, how the universe works, and so on. All of our wars, racism, hate, fear, destruction and neglect are exactly what one would expect from an intelligent species with no self-awareness. We must find a way to teach our children, all children, the fundamental knowledge of who we are and what the universe is. Only then, can we finally wake up, grow up, and be our best.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lynchings in the past have significantly shaped race relations in the present. A killing such as George Floyd’s lands on black people with a much heavier psychological weight because of lynching’s legacy. Too many white people fail to recognize this, and that needs to change. The hurt is too great, the simmering fear and anger too volatile, to bury forever. All Americans who would seek or demand a nation that is fairer to every citizen, less racist, and more peaceful have a responsibility to know this history in detail. … Confronting this ugliness would be difficult for everyone, of course, but it should be attempted. Ignorance and denial certainly have not worked, because this American wound still bleeds.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scientists believe that walking has this effect of enhancing creativity because it loosens the restraints and filters that our brains place on memory when we focus on a task. When one dedicates mental effort to something, the brain tries to help by shutting down what it deems to be irrelevant distractions from within. Walking can relax the mind enough to reduce these barriers and allow some unrelated memories to emerge. This is precisely what we want in order to maximize creativity. It helps when disconnected memories and disparate bits of information come forward, because they are often the source of new and unique ideas.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our present inability to define life succinctly, logically and consistently is a byproduct of something we can be grateful for. The difficulty exists because living and nonliving matter are intimately tangled as partners in the same grand game. Mere being is the big show. We live inside of and are part of a universe that is exciting and endlessly fascinating. All of it together—stars, planets, moons, rocks, molecules, atoms, and ‘life’—make the spectacle. What’s going on down at the quantum level, as well as dark energy and dark matter, makes clear that nonlife is no less amazing and surprising than life. The fact that the two realms blur from one to the other only makes learning and discovery more thrilling. Yes, we belong to a cool clique called life, with its blurry borders and loose membership requirements, but we also belong to a larger and even more exciting club called existence.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evolution does not mean improvement. There is no ladder of progress, no foresight, no plan, no goal. Evolution is the unintelligent and indifferent process of life changing over time. It doesn’t prepare lifeforms for the future. It can’t because the future is unknown. With evolution, the only winning is being alive right now and the only losing is being extinct. Every species on Earth today is tied for first. We can’t rank contemporary lifeforms as more or less evolved than others. And we can’t rank the long-term survivability of species because today’s big flashy advantage could be tomorrow’s death sentence. The mighty human brain, for example, might turn out to be a doomsday device. If we destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons then big primate brains would have been just another evolutionary dead-end.”
Guy P. Harrison (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source