Anti-Stupidity Quotes

Some unfortunates are not intellectually gifted by virtue of genetic endowment or brain injury, through no fault of their own. These individuals lack the cognitive capacity to learn more than rudimentary knowledge or skills, yet they possess value simply by being humans.

Other individuals have sufficient intellectual capacity to be capable of acquiring understanding, yet they chose not to comprehend reality because of emotional biases. I find such willful stupidity so uttely infuriating that I have decided to collect some quotes that accurately denigrate ignorance:

God of the Gaps:
"The history of science shows us that patching the gaps in our knowledge with miracles creates a path that leads only to perpetual ignorance."
~ Jerry Coyne, The Great Mutator, in The New Republic

Intelligent [sick] design theory:
"As the philosopher Philip Kitcher shows in his superb new book, Living With Darwin, the theory of intelligent design is a mixture of "dead science" and non-science. That is, insofar as ID makes scientific claims (for example, that natural selection cannot produce complexity), those claims not only are wrong, but were proved wrong years ago. And ID is deeply unscientific in its assertion that certain aspects of evolution (mutation, in Behe's case) required supernatural intervention. Behe's attacks on evolutionary theory are once again wrongheaded, but the intellectual situation grows far worse when we see what theory he offers in its place."
~ Jerry Coyne, The Great Mutator, in The New Republic

YECs:
"There is no polite way to say this: people who resist scientific explanations for natural phenomena such as the age of the earth and the fact of evolution are guilty of childish thinking."
~ Sharon Begley in So That's Why Evolution is in Trouble!

Quo Vadis?
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