“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.” PeopleKnowsMenWritingLongReadingNamesIndividualHeardCenturyStageLifetimeDisappearImpressionScholarSupporterLectures19th CenturyAppearingAcknowledgementGeneral PublicWorking ManSagan Author:Richard Lewontin
“The general public doesn't know and probably doesn't care about punctuated equilibria nor indeed should they, or the greenhouse effect on some other planet - they barely have the ability to cope with the greenhouse effect on their own planet. So I think you have to distinguish between the broad visibility of a scientist when he or she is speaking to a general public and trying to address general issues and the continued position that a scientist may have into the history of a particular subject.” ThinkingKnowsShouldTryingMayCareAbilityIssuesSubjectsEffectsPositionParticularPlanetsScientistAddressesBroadsEquilibriumGreenhousesGeneral PublicVisibility 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
