Latest Richard Lewontin Quotes from Interviews

• Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that extent I'm a cautious optimist.

  Richard Lewontin

  Work Out, Gravity, Currents

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• I think people who worry about planetary health on geological scales are totally misguided, that's not the point at all.

  Richard Lewontin

  Thinking, People, Worry

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them.

  Richard Lewontin

  Mass Extinction, Years, Interesting

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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 be used more, then would those people who oppose it are crying in the wilderness - that's the real problem.

  Richard Lewontin

  Running, Real, Lying

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  World, Want, Kind

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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 and they can massage the data so it fits them.

  Richard Lewontin

  Data, People, World

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Culture, World, Way

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• In my mind the job of a natural scientist is to bend over backwards to say something which can be demonstrated to be true or at least which is not of such a nature that there's no way to demonstrate that it's false.

  Richard Lewontin

  Jobs, Mind, Way

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• In fact perhaps the only law in biology is that all flesh is mortal and all species become extinct eventually.

  Richard Lewontin

  Law, Flesh, Facts

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

  Richard Lewontin

  Games, Stories, Use

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• History has got a lot to do with unique circumstances under certain particular cases and grand theories will always find counter cases. I don't think that people whose expertise lies in one thing should try to make grand theories about something (a) where it's very hard to get the evidence to prove that you're right and (b) where it's much too easy to make up stories that seem right.

  Richard Lewontin

  Lying, Unique, Thinking

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Writing, Ambition, Frustrated

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Steps, Study, Newton

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Believe, Discovery, Age

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Thinking, Issues, Trying

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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.

  Richard Lewontin

  Reading, Writing, Men

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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 sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

  Richard Lewontin

  Queens, Top Down, Psychology

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• 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 always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

  Richard Lewontin

  Events, Narrative, Kind

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• I assume the same problem exists in Australia as in America of back-biting and jealousy and parochialism among disciplines - there are the scientists, and there are the humanities people, and there are chemists and the physicists and everybody snipes at everybody else and inter-disciplinary communication is rare. But it's very precious and necessary.

  Richard Lewontin

  Communication, America, Australia

  Source: www.abc.net.au

• Quantification, experimentation, rigor, repetition, prediction - all of these are part of the experimental sciences. There's an iconography also namely man, and I do mean males in white coats who spin dials and wait for numbers to appear.

  Richard Lewontin

  Mean, Men, White

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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