“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.” IfsWorldBelieveMadeWholeAgeYoungUniverseGreaterPositionStudentsTaughtPlanetsTheoryFameDiscoveryScientistVery GoodAcceptedEducatedHumankindHierarchySnailYoung Students Author:Richard Lewontin
“If I ask you who is the most famous scientist who ever lived, or the greatest scientist who ever lived you'll say either Einstein or Newton or something like that because their claims were supposed to apply universally. But the claim of somebody who is studying a particular feature of the evolutionary process like whether it's very fast or very slow, or occurs in steps and so on, that's not a universal claim, that's a rather specialised claim and so you can't claim to great fame and great success.” IfsAsksProcessStepsStudyParticularFameScientistUniversalClaimsFeaturesNewtonGreat Success Author:Richard Lewontin
“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.” IfsWayWritingWellsAmbitionFrustrated Author:Richard Lewontin
“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.” IfsWorldWayCultureSidesEnvironmentOne ThingChanging The WorldMarchColleaguesUndesirableWarming Up Author:Richard Lewontin
“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.” IfsWorldWantShouldHumansKindHuman BeingsClaimsResponsibleSensible Author:Richard Lewontin
“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.” PeopleIfsKnowsHumansImportantHandsSocialDifficultPathIssuesImpossiblePositionExperienceScientistObjectivesTemptationTelling The TruthPretendingBeing HumanAutobiographyImportant IssuesInvestigators Author:Richard Lewontin
“An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.” IfsWayMightWould BeUnderstandingPoorKnowingEnvironmentEffectsShockOrganismsRudeDnaEcosystemsGmos Author:Richard Lewontin
