Thomas Huxley Quotes
My colleagues have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it, however it may jar against their inclinations.
Thomas Huxley, 1825-1895, British Biologist & President of the Royal Society, Quoted in Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
When a scientist is persuaded to change his position, he is acting in the great tradition of the best of scientists. When a politician does the same, he is a flip flopper, without any real principles and clearly not to be trusted. A scientist would not be trusted by his peers if he did not readily change is views.
See {627632} for an earlier advocy of change when circumstances warrant and {636175} for a modern view.
Ibn al-Nafis was one of the great scientists of all time. He analyzed the human heart, lungs, and circulatory system. This quotation is often given by Muslim modernists and reformers to illustrate that Islam at one time was open to new knowledge, dissent, ideas of all kinds. A century later, Islam closed intellectually and later and even today, Muslims are killed for what became heresy. Truth became determined by the Koran and the words of The Prophet only, Christianity and the Church imposed a similar restrictive view of truth using the Bible and Jesus. However, the Reformation and modernity led Christianity to merge and adopt the more modern and scientific view with the exception of some Christian fundamentalists. Islam had the modern view and abandoned it causing the many educated Islamic reformers and modernists of today great difficulty in changing the culture and laws as a whole.
This quotation from 1888 is apropos many of the major scientific advances which are counter-intuitive. Relativity was one; another was Quantum Mechanics where we have to learn to accept the fact that something can be in two (or more) places at once or that the exact same forces acting on an object can produce more than one result. Most non-scientists would see these as absurd, but they are basic characteristics of modern physics.
Many politicians have used this quote in recent years, but Moynahan seems to be the first.
This is as opposed to religion where usually we want unshakable faith, In science, we want our faith to be shakable when new data are discerned or new theories are developed.
Most politicians would never do this. Ideologues rarely analyze their beliefs. Pragmatic politicians are fearful of being called a flip flopper with no core principles. However, some politicians follow this advice. For example, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were both among the rare politicians who would frequently change positions as they learned more. See John Maynard Keynes {619441} for a personal statement of this principle and {636175} for a modern view.
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS HonFRSE FLS was an English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
