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Peter Medawar

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Famous Peter Medawar Quotes

“Benzer düşünceler, aceminin haftalar veya aylarını 'literatüre hakim olma'ya harcaması için de sözkonusudur. Kitap öğretisine aşırı bağımlılık hayal gücünü sınırlayıcı ve köstekleyici bir etki yapar. Başkalarının yaptığı araştırmalar üzerinde durmaksızın kafa yormak bazen, psikolojik açıdan, bizzat araştırma yapmanın yerini tutmaktadır; tıpkı roman okumanın, gerçek hayatta yaşanılacak romanların yerini alması gibi.”

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Book:Advice to a young scientist
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“Ben zekaya ve zeka yeteneğindeki kalıtımsal farklara inanırım. Ancak, zekanın bir tek sayı ile -I. Q. (zeka testi) sonucu gibi- ölçülebilecek basit bir yetenek olduğuna inanmıyorum. Bu ölçümlemeyi kabul eden psikologlar o kadar tutarsız beyanlarda bulunmuşlardır ki bunu konularını zedelemek için bilerek yaptıklarına inanmamak çok zor oluyor.”

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Book:Advice to a young scientist
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“Kültür konusunda kendini küçümsenmiş ve yetersiz hisseden bir bilimci, klasik edebiyat ve güzel sanatlar dünyasından tamamen uzaklaşarak teselli bulur. İncinmiş bir ruh için başka bir deva da 'çokbilmiş' olmaktır. Bu durumda çevresindekiler, o günlerin gözde senaryoları, yorumları, Gödel teoremi, Chomsky'nin dilbilimi kavramı, güzel sanatlarda Rosicrucian'cı etkiler konularındaki göz kamaştırıcı konuşmaları karşısında şaşkına dönecektir. Bu, gerçekten korkunç bir intikam; ancak, eski dostlarının onu görünce kaçışmaları ile sonuçlanır. Çokbilmiş konuşma biçiminde en sık olarak kullanılan şudur: "x diye bir şey yoktur; herkesin x dediği şey gerçekte y dir." Burada x, insanların inandığı herhangi bir şey olabilir; örneğin Rönesans, romantizmin yeniden canlanışı veya sanayi devrimi; y ise işçi sınıfının gönlünde yattığı söylenen en önemli şey. Yine de çokbilmişlik bilimcilerin meslek hastalıklarından sayılmaz. Benim tanıdığım en kötü çok bilmişlerin ikisi de ekonomistti.”

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Book:Advice to a young scientist
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“Hatalı bilimsel varsayımlar, sonradan yerlerine doğrularının konulabileceği düşünüldüğünde mazur görülebilirler; ancak, çalışmalarını ona inanmaya devam ederek sürdürenlere çok zarar verebilirler. Çünkü, teorilerine aşırı hayran olan bilimciler deneylerin ortaya koyduğu 'hayır' yanıtını kabul etmekten de aşırı ölçüde kaçınırlar. Bazen de bilimciler teorilerini sınamaya tabi tutmak yerine çevresinde oyalanır; yalnız ikinci derece sonuçları test eder, doğrudan ilgili olmayan ikincil konularla uğraşırlar; hipotezlerini çürütebilecek bir sonucun riskini göze alamazlar.”

MedawarGenç Bilim Adamına öğüTlerNermin ArıkTercümeBilimselDeneyVarsayım
Book:Advice to a young scientist
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“Nobel kazananlardan bazıları araştırmayı bırakır ve vaktini dünyayı dolaşıp değişik toplantılara katılarak geçirir. Bazen de, Bilim, İnsanlık, Değerler, İnsan Çabası veya buna benzer soyut sözcüklerden oluşan) konularda konferans verir. Bu saygın kişilerin egoları, kendilerine imza için sunulan bir sürü manifesto ile daha da kabarır; çünkü, imzaları bu manifestoların lehine büyük ağırlık koyacaktır. Bir örnek: "Dünya ulusları bundan böyle dostluk ve uyum içinde yaşamalı ve politik anlaşmazlıkları çözmek için savaş araçları kullanmaktan vazgeçmelidir.”

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Book:Advice to a young scientist
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“Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist may get great satisfaction from another's work and admire it deeply; it may give him great intellectual pleasure; but it gives him no sense of participation in the discovery, it does not carry him away, and his appreciation of it does not depend on his being carried away. If it were otherwise the inspirational origin of scientific discovery would never have been in doubt.”

IfsGivingMayDoeHas BeensPleasureDoubtEventsDependsDespairFindingsIntellectualDiscoveryScientistSatisfactionDelightAppreciationAdmireParticipationAccompanyIllusoryCarried AwayScientific Discovery
Book:The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science
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“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 in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.”

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Book:Induction and intuition in scientific thought
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“We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.”

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Author:Peter Medawar
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“Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.”

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Book:Induction and intuition in scientific thought
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“I do not believe indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary.”

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Book:The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science
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“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 the fact that the evolutionary theory permeates and supports every branch of biological science, much as the notion of the roundness of the earth underlies all geodesy and all cosmological theories on which the shape of the earth has a bearing. Thus antievolutionism is of the same stature as flat-earthism.”

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Author:Peter Medawar
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“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 observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.”

WayWantShouldHas BeensSpiritualCertainCoursesBeliefCausesReligiousPayMoralBloodShareAtheismMankindTearsComfortImportancePassionateConvictionJustifyIntensityReligious BeliefSuperstitiousObservanceRefreshmentsEntrusting
Book:The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science
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“It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.”

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Author:Peter Medawar
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“Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief.... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true.”

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Author:Peter Medawar
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“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 he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.”

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Book:Induction and intuition in scientific thought
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“I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.”

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Book:The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists
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“Scientists are entitled to be proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call 'theirs' except the things they have done or thought of first? People who criticize scientists for wanting to enjoy the satisfaction of intellectual ownership are confusing possessiveness with pride of possession. Meanness, secretiveness and, sharp practice are as much despised by scientists as by other decent people in the world of ordinary everyday affairs; nor, in my experience, is generosity less common among them, or less highly esteemed.”

PeopleWorldFirstsDoneEnjoyCommonPracticePrideProudIntellectualOrdinaryScientistEverydayAffairSatisfactionPossessionGenerosityAccomplishmentDecentCriticizeOwnershipEntitledBe ProudConfusingDespisedMeannessPossessiveness
Author:Peter Medawar
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“In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive.... The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see.”

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Author:Peter Medawar
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“Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.”

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Book:The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science
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“How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.”

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Author:Peter Medawar
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“In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only 'intended' to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.”

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Book:The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science
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“French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”

PhilosophyUseSpiritLanguageManifestationProseTiresomeIdiomOpaqueProse PoetryTipsy
Book:The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science
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