Why Bats Shouldn’t Exist: The Limits of Knowledge, the Pitfalls of Prediction, and the Triumph of the Possible Over the Probable

Without wishing to diminish the importance of what they have been able to see, I think that they underestimate the cumulative nature of science, which is equally undeniable and plays a critical role, especially in the moments of greatest change. They fail to see that what changes in scientific revolutions is not what could reasonably be expected to

One out of every five mammal species alive right now is a bat—some

Consider precognitive phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as

‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is a famous question asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. (More precisely, what would it be like for a person to have the echo-location senses of a bat?) Perhaps the full answer is that in future it will be not so much the task of philosophy to discover what that is like, but the task of technological art to give us

Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence might not actually be a contradiction — the real explanation might just be slightly more complicated than people realized. Go back and revisit scientific near-misses, maybe there’s a wrinkle they didn’t