When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can answer. That is, it is often the case that the operations of a science are not a consequence of the problematic of that science, but that the problematic is induced by the available means.
Interpretation
Difficult questions often lead to simpler inquiries that can be answered, making researchers more likely to pursue those instead.
Richard Lewontin's quote highlights that when scientists confront challenging issues, they tend to redirect their focus to questions that are more manageable, avoiding the complexity of the original problem. This leads to the idea that the limitations in how science operates are often shaped not just by the problems themselves, but by the tools and methods available to researchers, thereby altering the direction and depth of scientific inquiry.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific inquiry, to illustrate the importance of formulating the right questions.
The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of .. Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism... We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.
It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
The human race has a yearning to explore. That's part of our biological and psychological makeup.
At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.
Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.
One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
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