Richard Lewontin Quotes

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Commitment, Acceptance, Science

  "Billions and Billions of Demons" by Richard Lewontin, www.nybooks.com. January 9, 1997.

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• En un ecosistema siempre se puede intervenir y cambiar algo, pero no hay forma de saber cuáles serán los efectos posteriores ni cómo afectará al medio ambiente. Tenemos una comprensión tan miserablemente pobre de cómo se desarrolla el organismo a partir de su ADN que me sorprendería que no nos lleváramos un duro golpe tras otro.

  Richard Lewontin

  Dna, Ecosystems, Gmos

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Commitment, Doors, Feet

  "Billions and Billions of Demons" by Richard C. Lewontin, www.nybooks.com. January 9, 1997.

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Stars, Imagination, Intellectual

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• The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.

  Richard Lewontin

  Struggle, Competition, Environmental

  "It’s Even Less in Your Genes" by Richard C. Lewontin, www.nybooks.com. May 26, 2011.

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• In fact perhaps the only law in biology is that all flesh is mortal and all species become extinct eventually.

  Richard Lewontin

  Law, Flesh, Facts

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

  Richard Lewontin

  Miracle, May, Deities

  "Billions and Billions of Demons". www.nybooks.com. January 9, 1997.

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• There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

  Richard Lewontin

  Events, Narrative, Kind

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• If we're going to make a politically responsible and a scientifically sensible claim it should not be stop the world exactly where it is because that's not possible. It has to be to decide what kind of world do we as human beings want to live in.

  Richard Lewontin

  World, Want, Kind

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

  Richard Lewontin

  Games, Stories, Use

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Butterfly, Unique, Long

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• Con respecto a fenómenos como la extinción masiva, alguien podría decir que para qué preocuparse, porque desde una perspectiva geológica las extinciones masivas no son tan malas, acaban con algunas cosas y luego, 10 millones de años más tarde, obtenemos objetos nuevos e interesantes, pero yo les digo que las extinciones masivas son realmente terribles para la gente que se ve atrapada en medio de ellas.

  Richard Lewontin

  Mass Extinction, Years, Interesting

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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

  Richard Lewontin

  Pensamiento, Gente, Preocupación

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Culture, World, Way

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• Scientists are educated from a very early time and a very early age to believe that the greater scientist is the scientist who makes discoveries or theories that apply to the greatest ambit of things in the world. And if you've only made a very good theory about snails, or a very good theory about some planets but not about the universe as a whole, or about all the history of humankind, then you have in some sense accepted a lower position in the hierarchy of the fame of science as it's taught to you as a young student.

  Richard Lewontin

  Believe, Discovery, Age

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Mean, Answers, Scientist

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• The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other hand, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our own lives how impossible that is.

  Richard Lewontin

  Hands, Issues, People

  "Sex, Lies, and Social Science". The New York Review of Books, www.nybooks.com. April 20, 1995.

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• If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will write for you.

  Richard Lewontin

  Writing, Ambition, Frustrated

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• My general impression about people like Steve Gould and Carl Sagan and so on is that when they disappear as individuals and are no longer appearing on the stage and they are no longer writing, that their lifetime of acknowledgement by the general reading public is not very long... There were many people in the 19th century who were equally famous people who gave working man's lectures, supporters of Darwin, we as scholars know their names but the general public never heard of them.

  Richard Lewontin

  Lectura, Escritura, Hombres

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• In my mind the job of a natural scientist is to bend over backwards to say something which can be demonstrated to be true or at least which is not of such a nature that there's no way to demonstrate that it's false.

  Richard Lewontin

  Jobs, Mind, Way

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that extent I'm a cautious optimist.

  Richard Lewontin

  Work Out, Gravity, Currents

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Queens, Top Down, Psychology

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• Quantification, experimentation, rigor, repetition, prediction - all of these are part of the experimental sciences. There's an iconography also namely man, and I do mean males in white coats who spin dials and wait for numbers to appear.

  Richard Lewontin

  Medio, Hombres, Blanco

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Communication, America, Australia

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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• Si le pregunto quién es el científico más famoso que ha existido, o el mayor científico que ha existido, dirá que Einstein o Newton, o algo parecido, porque se supone que sus afirmaciones son de aplicación universal. Pero la afirmación de alguien que está estudiando una característica particular del proceso evolutivo, como si es muy rápido o muy lento, o si ocurre por etapas, etc., no es una afirmación universal, es una afirmación más bien especializada y, por tanto, no se puede pretender tener una gran fama y un gran éxito.

  Richard Lewontin

  Steps, Study, Newton

  Fuente: www.abc.net.au

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