Peter Medawar Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
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. I suppose we all realize the degree to which fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.

Peter Medawar
What is research but learning - and what scientist ever feels that, being complete, his research is now at last finished? The nature of science is such that a scientist goes on learning all his life - and must - and exults in the obligation upon him to do so.

Peter Medawar
Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.

Peter Medawar
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem able to get on very well without it.

Peter Medawar
Philosophers and logicians since the days of Bacon have been entirely clear on this point: deduction merely makes explicit information that is already there. It is not a procedure by which new information can be brought into being.

Peter Medawar
One can envisage an end of science no more readily than one can envisage an end of imaginative literature or the fine arts.

Peter Medawar
Scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds. Embarrassing questions tend to remain unasked or, if asked, to be asked rudely.

Peter Medawar
A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.

Peter Medawar
Science is no more a classified inventory of factual information than history a chronology of dates. The equation of science with facts and of the humane arts with ideas is one of the shabby genteelisms that bolster up the humanist's self-esteem.

Peter Medawar
It may seem that palaeontology is a science of pure speculation or inquisitiveness, and the palaeontologist the most unreal and useless of researchers; a man dedicated to retrospection, plunged living into the past, where he spends his days collecting the debris of dead things.

Peter Medawar
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
A scientist does not hold exactly the same opinions about his research from one day to the next, for reading, reflection, and discussions with colleagues cause a change of emphasis here or there and possibly even a radical reappraisal of his way of thinking.

Peter Medawar
Money can't buy ideas, that's for sure, but lack of it can prevent one having them.

Peter Medawar
I am afraid we shall have to regard the funding of "pure" research as a tax levied upon society that is not dissimilar in kind from that which maintains art galleries and opera houses — a "civilization tax", perhaps.

Peter Medawar
It is fortunate for human beings that no Geneva convention forbids the prosecution of germ warfare by germs themselves; if it did, there would be no antibiotics.

Peter Medawar
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
All experimentation is criticism. If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one's views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all.

Peter Medawar
Science can only proceed on a basis of confidence, so that scientists do not suspect each other of dishonesty or sharp practice, and believe each other unless there is very good reason to do otherwise.

Peter Medawar
Goodness knows how it [genetics of behavior] is to be got at. It may be outflanked or it may yield to attrition, but probably not to direct assault. No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. The most he can hope for is the kindly contempt earned by the Utopian politicians.

Peter Medawar
It can be said that Science progresses only by peeling away, one after another, all the covering of apparent stability in the world; disclosing beneath the immobility of the infinitely small, movement of extra rapidity, and beneath the immobility of the Immense, movement of extra slowness.

Peter Medawar
Nowadays we all give too much thought to the material blessings or evils that science has brought with it, and too little to its power to liberate us from the confinements of ignorance and superstition. The greatest liberation of thought achieved by the scientific revolution was to have given human beings a sense of future in this world.

Peter Medawar
To say that Einstein formulated a theory of relativity by guesswork is on all fours with saying that Wordsworth wrote rhymes and Mozart tuneful music. It is cheeky where something grave is called for.

Peter Medawar
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
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it.

Peter Medawar
Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist may get great satisfaction from another's work and admire it deeply; it may give him great intellectual pleasure; but it gives him no sense of participation in the discovery, it does not carry him away, and his appreciation of it does not depend on his being carried away. If it were otherwise the inspirational origin of scientific discovery would never have been in doubt.

Peter Medawar
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
The similarity between them is not the taxonomic key to some other, deeper, affinity, and our recognizing its existence marks the end, not the inauguration, of a train of thought.

Peter Medawar
In spite of all the obstacles that Teilhard perhaps wisely puts in our way, it is possible to discern a train of thought in The Phenomenon of Man.

Peter Medawar
I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.

Peter Medawar