Peter Medawar Quotes

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• Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Reality, Might

  "The hope of progress: a scientist looks at problems in philosophy, literature and science".

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• How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

  Peter Medawar

  Philosophy, Taken, Science

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• For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Imagination, Creative

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.63, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.

  Peter Medawar

  Truth, Giving, Advice

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

  10 Copy quote

• The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

  Peter Medawar

  Change, Nature, New Beginnings

  "The Art of the Soluble". Book by Peter Medawar, 1967.

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• The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

  Peter Medawar

  Thinking, Alternatives, Term

  Peter Brian Medawar, J. S. Medawar (1978). “The Life Science: Current Ideas of Biology”, HarperCollins Publishers

  18 Copy quote

• Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.

  Peter Medawar

  Growing Up, Anger, Hunting

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.116, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.

  Peter Medawar

  Knowledge, Science, Past

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• It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting".

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Yield, Discovery

  "Advice to a young scientist".

  14 Copy quote

• Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth.

  Peter Medawar

  Unbiased, Innocent, Observation

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

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• Science is the art of the solvable.

  Peter Medawar

  Art

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• It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.

  Peter Medawar

  Falling In Love, Science, Years

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

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• The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.

  Peter Medawar

  Religious, Humorous, School

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• If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.

  Peter Medawar

  Get Better, Medical Science, May

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• The bells which toll for mankind are - most of them, anyway - like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.

  Peter Medawar

  Cheerful, Bells, Faults

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• The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.

  Peter Medawar

  Thinking, Law, Information

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

  16 Copy quote

• Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Ideas, History

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• An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.

  Peter Medawar

  Wells, Experiments

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• The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.

  Peter Medawar

  Strong, True Or False, Incentives

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

  4 Copy quote

• It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief.

  Peter Medawar

  Spiritual, Religious, Blood

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.210, Oxford University Press, USA

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• All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small.

  Peter Medawar

  Mean, Science, Ideas

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• Heredity proposes and development disposes.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Development, Heredity

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• Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Paper, Fraud

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.33, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.

  Peter Medawar

  Children, Discovery, Vision

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

  4 Copy quote

• I regret my disbelief in God.

  Peter Medawar

  Regret, Atheism, Disbelief

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.209, Oxford University Press, USA

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