This Will Make You Smarter

That is, life’s diversity does not exist because it is necessary for living things. Birds

Societies that adopt innovative, predictive, and adaptive models designed around a significant, ongoing redistribution of global resources will be most likely to survive in the future.

It is a way of thinking, the best approach yet devised (if still an imperfect one) for discovering progressively better approximations of how things really are.

Our internal metabolisms are intimately interwoven with this Earthly metabolism; one result is the replacement of every atom in our bodies every seven years or so.

reactive use of intelligence narrows our vision. In contrast, projective thinking is expansive, “open-ended,” and speculative, requiring the thinker to create the context, concepts, and the objectives.

Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

Focusing on short-term, incremental solutions will only distract us from working on producing the home runs that could change the assumptions regarding energy and society’s resources.

the laboratory already intuit that most ideas don’t pan out, and those that do sometimes result from chance or charitable interpretations. Conversely, they also recognize that replicability means they’re really onto something.

Most scientific disciplines have long timelines of data, but many ecological disciplines don’t. We are forced to rely on secondhand and anecdotal

The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself: “otherness” not among DNA-encoded species but among life-forms using different molecules to encode traits.