Peter Medawar Quotes - Page 2

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Affairs Art Atheism Belief Evidence Giving Mankind

The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?

Peter Medawar

Matter, Truth Is, Scientist

Peter Brian Medawar, J. S. Medawar (1985). “Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology”, p.196, Harvard University Press

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I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.

Peter Medawar

Believe, Science, Simple

Peter Brian Medawar (1981). “Advice to a young scientist”

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The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.

Peter Medawar

Art, Mean, Science

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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.

Peter Medawar

Relationship, Nature, Loss

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If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.

Peter Medawar

Cutting, Luck, Ears

Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.86, Oxford University Press, USA

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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.

Peter Medawar

Teacher, Taken, Order

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I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.

Peter Medawar

Believe, People, Leader

Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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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.

Peter Medawar

Philosophy, Science, Artist

Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.13, Oxford University Press, USA

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Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

Peter Medawar

Science, Years, Sky

Peter Brian Medawar (1979). “Advice to a young scientist”, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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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.

Peter Medawar

Science, Men, Discovery

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When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite.

Peter Medawar

Mistake, Constitution Of The United States, Purpose

"Memoir of a thinking radish: an autobiography". Book by Peter Medawar, Oxford University Press, p. 117, 1986.

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If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be heard with specially close attention. Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.
Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.

Peter Medawar

Real, Science, Giving

Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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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.

Peter Medawar

Chemicals, Genetics, Process

Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.2, Oxford University Press, USA

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If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

Peter Medawar

Art, Science, Research

Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.42, Oxford University Press, USA

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To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

Peter Medawar

Science, Mind, Progress

Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.119, Oxford University Press, USA

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I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

Peter Medawar

Science, Annoyed, Calling

"Advice to a Young Scientist". Book by Peter Medawar, p. 25, 1979.

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It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

Peter Medawar

Mean, Thinking, Worry

Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.

Peter Medawar

Spiritual, Religious, Giving

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You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

Peter Medawar

Science, Giants, Arms

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The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

Peter Medawar

Science, Literature, Cases

Peter Brian Medawar (1973). “The hope of progress: a scientist looks at problems in philosophy, literature and science”, Anchor

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Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

Peter Medawar

Science, America, World

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It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.

Peter Medawar

Brother, Time, Science

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We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that is, having to do with the conduct of life. We are still beginners, and for that reason may hope to improve. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. There is no need to be dismayed by the fact that we cannot yet envisage a definitive solution of our problems, a resting-place beyond which we need not try to go.

Peter Medawar

Political, Mind, Progress

Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, September 3, 1969.

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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.

Peter Medawar

Pride, Practice, People

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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.

Peter Medawar

Philosophy, Prose Poetry, Use

Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.2, Oxford University Press, USA

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Born: February 28, 1915
Died: October 2, 1987
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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