11 Quotes by Richard Lewontin

To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

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.

The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the “struggle for existence” as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.