Asa Gray Quotes

I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.

No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

Many people, including myself, had our scientific lives changed by the inspiring new vision of science that Popper gave us.

As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

I think that I could see Darwin having a relationship with Asia.

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.

Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

Copernicanism and other essential ingredients of modern science survived only because reason was frequently overruled in their past.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Time and space are absolute. Diseases are evil spirits that inhabit the body. Parallel lines never meet. The earth is the center of the universe. Children are miniature adults. At one time in history each of these beliefs was generally held to be true. Each, however, gave way to different ideas and even different world views.

The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic world & its connection with the time past & with Man; that it involves the question of Man & his relation to the brutes, of instinct, intelligence & reason, of Creation, transmutation & progressive improvement or development. Each set of geological questions & of ethnological & zool. & botan. are parts of the great problem which is always assuming a new aspect.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world... I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable.

We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.