Occupation: Writer Birth: February 28, 1915 Death: October 2, 1987
Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made ….
It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative quali….
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….
Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?.
It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theorie….
The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the….
It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious ob….
To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold i….
Heredity proposes and development disposes..
The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by….
If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs..
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….
There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus..
In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose….
Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherenc….
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….
To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind..
No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the most important pro….
Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved….
It is naïve to suppose that the acceptance of evolution theory depends upon the evidence of a number of so-called "proofs"; it depends rather upon th….
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….