Alun Anderson

Anderson's First Law (of the Experienced Science Journalist)

Science may be objective but scientists are not.

Anderson's Second Law (of the Experienced Science Journalist)

A scientist who can speak without jargon is either an idiot or a genius.

Anderson's Third Law (on Subjectivity and Objectivity from the Interface of Neuroscience and Computers)

The bigger the brain, the better the stories it fabricates for us.

Corollary

The more technology gives us the power to record and store everything, the less it captures reality.

Anderson's Fourth Law (for ordinary folk)

Science can produce knowledge but it cannot produce wisdom.

Anderson's Fifth Law (Based on An Ancient Zen Saying to An Untutored Monk Seeking Wisdom)

If you can tell the false from the true you are already a scientist.

John Rennie

Rennie's Law of Credibility

Scientists don't always know best about matters of science-but they're more likely to be right than the critics who make that argument.

1st Corollary to the Law of Credibility

The first job of any scientific fraud is to persuade the public that science is itself unscientific.

2nd Corollary to the Law of Credibility

Any iconoclast with a scientifically unorthodox view who reminds you that Galileo was persecuted too…ain't Galileo.

Rennie's Law of Evolutionary Biology

The most important environmental influences on any organism are always the other organisms around it.

Corollary to the Law of Evolutionary Biology

Species do not occupy ecological niches; they define them.

Charles Simonyi

Simonyi's Law of Guaranteed Evolution

Anything that can be done, could be done "meta".

Paul Ewald

Ewald's First Law

The defining characteristic of science—the one that gives sciences its extraordinary explanatory power—is the objective use of evidence to distinguish between alternative guesses.

Corollary 1

Most of religion is antithetical to science.

Corollary 2

Much of Western Medicine is antithetical to science.
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Corollary 3

Quite a bit of Science is antithetical to science.

Ewald's Second Law

Science is the conversation about how the world is. Culture is the conversation about how else the world could be, and how else we could experience it.

Science wants to know what can be said about the world, what can be predicted about it. Art likes to see which other worlds are possible, to see how it would feel if it were this way instead of that way. As such art can give us the practice and agility to think and experience in new ways—preparing us for the new understandings of things that science supplies.

Helena Cronin

Cronin's law of dual information storage

Adaptations stockpile information in environments as well as in genes.

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a "machine for turning coffee into theorems". In much the same way, genes are machines for turning stars into a bird's compass; carotenoids into males of dazzling beauty; smells into love-potions; facial muscles into signals of friendship; a glance into uncertainty of paternity; and oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells. More strictly, genes are machines for turning stars into birds and thereby into more genes.

This reminds us that adaptations weld together two information-storage systems. They build up a store of information in genes, meticulously accumulated, elaborated and honed down evolutionary time. And, to match that store, they also stockpile information in the environment. For genes need resources to build and run organisms; and adaptations furnish genes (or organisms) with the information to pluck those resources from the environment. So stars and carotenoids and glances need to be there generation after generation no less reliably than the information carried by genes.

Thus genes and environments are not in opposition; not zero-sum; not parallel but separate. Rather, they are designed to work in tandem. Their interconnection is highly intricate, minutely structured; and it becomes ever more so over evolutionary time.

And thus, without environments to provide resources, genes would not be viable; and without genes to specify what constitutes an environment, environments would not exist. So how could biology not be an environmental issue? And, conversely, how could environments not be—necessarily—a biological issue?

Cronin's law of adaptations and environments

What constitutes an organism's environment depends on the species' adaptations.

What constitutes an organism's environment? The answer is that it is the organism's adaptations that stake out which are the relevant aspects of the world. An environment is not simply a given. It is the typical characteristics of a species, its adaptations, that specify what constitutes the environment for that species.

Think of it this way. Adaptations are keys to unlocking the world's resources. They are the means by which organisms harness features of the world for their own use, transforming them from part of the indifferent world-out-there into the organism's own tailor-made, species-specific environment, an environment brimming with materials and information for the organism's own distinctive adaptive needs.

And so to understand how any species interacts with its environment, we need to start by exploring that species' adaptations. Only through adaptations was that environment constructed and only through understanding adaptations can we reconstruct it.

And, similarly, within a sexually reproducing species, differences between the sexes should be the default assumption. In particular, the female's adaptations should not be treated as mere adumbrations of the male's. On the contrary, if a rule-of-thumb default is needed, turn to the female. After all, the 'little brown bird' is what the entire species—males, females and juveniles—looks like before sexual selection distorts her mate into a showy explosion of colour and song. When it comes to environments, males perceive them as platforms for status games. Females most certainly do not.

Antonio Damasio

Damasio's First Law

The body precedes the mind.

Damasio's Second Law

Emotions precede feelings.

Damasio's Second Law

Concepts precede words.

Brian Eno

Eno's First Law

Culture is everything we don't have to do

We have to eat, but we didn't have to invent Baked Alaskas and Beef Wellington. We have to clothe ourselves, but we didn't have to invent platform shoes and polka-dot bikinis. We have to communicate, but we didn't have to invent sonnets and sonatas. Everything we do—beyond simply keeping ourselves alive—we do because we like making and experiencing art and culture.

Eno's Second Law

Science is the conversation about how the world is. Culture is the conversation about how else the world could be, and how else we could experience it.

Science wants to know what can be said about the world, what can be predicted about it. Art likes to see which other worlds are possible, to see how it would feel if it were this way instead of that way. As such art can give us the practice and agility to think and experience in new ways - preparing us for the new understandings of things that science supplies.

Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Any sufficiently advanced system of magic would be indistinguishable from a technology.

The first one is sometimes called "Raymond's Law" now, though I originally called it "Linus's Law" when I formulated it. Second one. Hmmm. Several people have since invented this one independently, but I came up with it more than twenty years ago. It's a reply to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Raymond's Law of Consequences

The road to hell has often been paved with good intentions. Therefore, evil is best recognized not by its motives but by its methods.  

Andrian Kreye

Kreye's Law of Literalism

When devaluated information makes opinion an added value, the law of literalism is permanently questioned, while remaining the last resort of reason.

The inflation of available information has devaluated word and image to mere content. The resulting perception fatigue is increasingly met with the overused rhetorical tool of polarizing opinion. It’s based on an old trick used by street vendors. In the intellectual food court of mass media, opinion appeals to reflexes just as the fried fat and sugar smells of snackfood outlets activate age-old instincts of hunting and gathering. In the average consumer opinion triggers an illusion of enlightenment and understanding that ultimately clouds the reason of literalism.

Literalism is freedom from credo, dogma and philosophical pessimism. It’s the process of finding reality driven by an optimistic faith in its existence. It tries to transcend the limits of the word, by permanently questioning any perception of reality.

Belief and ideology, the strongest purveyors of opinion, have long known the language of science and reason. Creationists use secular reasoning to demand that schools stop teaching the laws of evolution. Right-wing radicals and religious fundamentalists of all creeds tone down their world visions to fit into an opinionated consensus. Economic and political forces use selective findings to present their interests as fact.

Literalism can become an exhausting effort to defend the principles of fact and reason in a polarized world. The complex and often boring nature of factual reality makes it an unglamorous voice amid a choir of sparkling witticisms and provocations. Devoid of the ecstasies and spiritual cushioning of religion it denies age old longings. It can be decried as heresy or simultaneously accused of treason by all sides. It must sustain the insecurities brought on by the absence of ultimate truth. Having been the gravitational center of enlightenment, it must be defended as the last resort of reason.

Frank Tipler

Tipler's Law of Unilimited Progress

The laws of physics place no limits on progress, be it scientific, economic, cultural, or intellectual. In fact, the laws of physics require the knowledge and wealth possessed by intelligent beings in the universe to increase without limit, this knowledge and wealth becoming literally infinite by the the end of time. Intelligent life forms must inevitably expand out from their planets of origin, and convert the entire universe into a biosphere. If the laws of physics be for us, who can be against us?

Dan Sperber

Sperber's Shudder

Thanks for the invitation, but this time I will pass: I am too much of an anarchist: the only laws I like are scientific ones, and the idea of some normative statement being labelled, even if just for fun, "Sperber's Law", makes me shudder. Sorry! (But I will enjoy reading the "laws" of other people).

Gregory Benford

Benford's Modified Clarke Law

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

W. Daniel Hillis

Hillis' Law

The representation becomes the reality.

Or more precisely: Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent.

Examples:

Dollars become more important than gold.
The brand becomes more important than the company.
The painting becomes more important than the landscape.
The new medium (which begins as a representation of the old medium) eclipses the old.
The prize becomes more important than the achievement.
The genes become more important than the organism.

David Gelernter

Gelernter's First Law

Computers make people stupid.

Gelernter'sSecond Law

One expert is worth a million intellectuals. (This law is onlyapproximate.)

Gelernter's Third Law

Scientists know all the right answers and none of the right questions.