Peter Medawar

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“The spread of secondary and latterly of 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 (1915-1987)

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

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)

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

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)

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“There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare — particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for — that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.”

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)

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“There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. 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. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common?”

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)

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“In choosing topics for research and departments to enlist in, a young scientist must beware of following fashion. It is one thing to fall into step with a great concerted movement of thought such as molecular genetics or cellular immunology, but quite another merely to fall in with prevailing fashion for, say, some new histochemical procedure or technical gimmick.”

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)

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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 (1915-1987)

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"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth."

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)

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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 (1915-1987)

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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 (1915-1987)

heredity propose development dispose

"Heredity proposes and development disposes."

― Peter Medawar (1915-1987)