For most of human history, people were infected with intestinal worms. The worms, in turn, evolved to modulate their hosts' immune responses — keeping inflammation in check so the host could survive and the worms could keep living inside them. The modern, wormy-free immune system, the hypothesis goes, never got that memo and remains primed to overreact.
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The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
Carl Sagan — Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
The man of science must work with method and system, but the artist works by inspiration, and what the artist produces by inspiration the man of science can explain by analysis only after the fact.
Henri Bergson — The Creative Mind
The mind has not merely made a discovery of external fact; it has altered its own character by the attempt to know external fact.
Alfred North Whitehead — Science and the Modern World