Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provi….

A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when so….

French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to t….

The bells which toll for mankind are - most of them, anyway - like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our….

The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws….

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because….

If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be hear….

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up ….

Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist m….

Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherenc….

All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance.….

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but anothe….

I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredi….

When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I….

The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our convicti….

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was a….

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from th….

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it..

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all..

Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge..

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in..