In other words, Aristotle believed that a dropped rock fell to the earth because rocks belonged on earth and wanted to be there.

As recently as the 1980s, the idea of “emotional intelligence” was not taken seriously, particularly by men; today, most professions regard it as important as any scholastic achievement. In a hundred years, qualitative intelligence might be unilaterally prioritized over quantitative aptitude.

We classify the octopus as intelligent because of its ability to do human things, based on the accepted position that we are the most intelligent species on Earth.

I sometimes suspect that—just after the Industrial Revolution—the ongoing evolution of society accelerated beyond the speed human consciousness could evolve alongside it.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant.

for why smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers—they work from the flawed premise that their worldview is standard.

We understand the past through the words of those who experienced it. But those individuals aren’t necessarily reliable, and we are reminded of this constantly. The average person can watch someone attack a cop with a hammer and misdescribe what he saw twenty minutes after it happened.

Philosophically, as a species, we are committed to this. In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.

These are constants like “the mass of an electron” and “the strength of gravity,” all of which have been precisely measured and never change. These twenty numbers appear inconceivably fine-tuned—in fact, if these numbers didn’t have the exact value that they do, nothing in the universe would exist. They are so perfect that it almost appears as if