2284) The closer one looks at these performances of matter in living organisms, the more impressive the show becomes.

Max Delbruck
"A Physicist Looks At Biology" (1949) in
Transactions of the Connecticut Academy
of Arts and Sciences (38:175-90)
quoted by Jonathan Weiner in
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2285) It is almost a law of science: the more indirect the evidence, the more polarized the debate. [...] Meanwhile, the more direct the evidence, the less the answers look either-or.

Jonathan Weiner
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2286) John Endler, [who studies evolutionary pressure in guppy populations] does not like talking with Creationists [...] "I avoid it," It's really a waste of time. Not long ago on an airplane I talked for an hour with someone about what I do, and never once mentioned the word evolution. It's very easy to do, you know. Darwin himself doesn't use the word evolution in the whole of the Origin [of Species]. You just talk about what happens, and how you can study what happens: changes over many generations. It might be interesting to write a book that way now: don't use the word evolution until the very last page.

"Anyway, the whole time on the plane, my fellow passenger was growing more and more excited. 'What a neat idea! What a neat idea!" Finally, as the plane was landing, I told him this neat idea is called evolution. He turned purple."

"I've done exactly the same thing - and never let on it was evolution - and got exactly the same response," says Rosemary [Grant, who studies evolution in Darwin's finches in the Galapagos islands]. "I described our work on Daphne [Major] to a Jehovah's Witness. And he followed along, and said, "Oh, how fascinating.'"

"Asked intelligent questions," says Peter [her husband and fellow researcher].

"And I never plucked up enough courage to say, "Well, you know what all this means...'"

Jonathan Weiner
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2287) [T]he strength and the weakness of science [is] that, without collective trust, it simply could not work. Instead there would be the dismal apparatus of mutual suspicion familiar to any accountant. Checking the scientific books in this way would be a task as joyless as accountancy: and no decent investigator would want to do it. That is why fraud [in the sciences] causes such dismay. [...] [T]he central truth about scientific fraud [...] [is that it] is extraordinarily rare. The reason is simple. Science is a card game against Nature, the ultimate opponent The hope is to deduce the hand she holds from the few clues she is willing to disclose. It is possible to win every time by faking one's own cards, but that removes the whole point of playing the game.

The commonest form of delusion in the sciences is self-delusion, persuading oneself that a result is there when it is not. [...] There is, certainly some dishonesty. Perhaps there is more than there was. It is not gratuitous [...]Instead it can be blamed on the intrusion into the laboratory of the morals of the marketplace.

Steve Jones
"Crooked Bones" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of Unraveling Piltdown: The Science
Fraud of the Century and Its Solution
by John Evangelist Walsh]