Quotes by Richard Lewontin

Richard Lewontin

An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there’s no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don’t get one rude shock after another.

Dna

Ecosystems

Gmos

An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It’s not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases and their unique life histories. That’s butterfly collecting.

Butterfly

Long

Unique

As an American I must say I haven’t been very encouraged by the way in which the people who run the government in the United States have been listening to those contrary voices. And so long as the power to run the world lies in the hands of people who are quite happy to see it get warmer, or fuel be used more, then would those people who oppose it are crying in the wilderness – that’s the real problem.

Lying

Real

Running

Evolutionists … have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Acceptance

Commitment

Science

History has got a lot to do with unique circumstances under certain particular cases and grand theories will always find counter cases. I don’t think that people whose expertise lies in one thing should try to make grand theories about something (a) where it’s very hard to get the evidence to prove that you’re right and (b) where it’s much too easy to make up stories that seem right.

Lying

Thinking

Unique

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

Psychology

Queens

Top Down

I assume the same problem exists in Australia as in America of back-biting and jealousy and parochialism among disciplines – there are the scientists, and there are the humanities people, and there are chemists and the physicists and everybody snipes at everybody else and inter-disciplinary communication is rare. But it’s very precious and necessary.

America

Australia

Communication

I think people who worry about planetary health on geological scales are totally misguided, that’s not the point at all.

People

Thinking

Worry

If I ask you who is the most famous scientist who ever lived, or the greatest scientist who ever lived you’ll say either Einstein or Newton or something like that because their claims were supposed to apply universally. But the claim of somebody who is studying a particular feature of the evolutionary process like whether it’s very fast or very slow, or occurs in steps and so on, that’s not a universal claim, that’s a rather specialised claim and so you can’t claim to great fame and great success.

Newton

Steps

Study

If I put myself on the side of those who see the world as warming up in a bad way, who see the general march of industrial culture as something undesirable, the one thing I must be beware of doing and which my colleagues on that side don’t beware of doing, we must beware of saying we’ve got to stop changing the environment. There is no ‘the’ environment which we can change, the world is changing all the time.

Culture

Way

World

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Acceptance

Age

Ambition

America

Answers

Australia

Believe

Butterfly

Commitment

Communication

Competition

Culture

Currents

Data

Deities

Discovery

Dna

Doors

Ecosystems

Environmental

Events

Facts

Feet

Flesh

Frustrated

Games

Gmos

Gravity

Hands

Imagination

Intellectual

Interesting

Issues

Jobs

Kind

Law

Long

Lying

Mass Extinction

May

Mean

Men

Mind

Miracle

Narrative

Newton

People

Psychology

Queens

Reading

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Quotes by Richard Lewontin

Richard Lewontin

An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It’s not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases and their unique life histories. That’s butterfly collecting.

I think people who worry about planetary health on geological scales are totally misguided, that’s not the point at all.

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

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