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… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
I assume the same problem exists in Australia as in America of back-biting and jealousy and parochialism among disciplines - there are the scientists,… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
In my mind the job of a natural scientist is to bend over backwards to say something which can be demonstrated to be true… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
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… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share
People who have various kinds of politics for whom it is congenial for their apriority politics to say yes, things are getting much worse. They are opposed by people who also have a priori politics saying that this is the best of all possible worlds, capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread and you're just alarmists and so on… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
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… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share
As an American I must say I haven't been very encouraged by the way in which the people who run the government in the United States have been listening to those contrary voices. And so long as the power to run the world lies in the hands of people who are quite happy to see it get warmer, or fuel… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share
Evolutionists ... have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. 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… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share
Quantification, experimentation, rigor, repetition, prediction - all of these are part of the experimental sciences. There's an iconography also namely man, and I do… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
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… — Richard Lewontin Copy Share Image
