Peter Medawar Quotes About Purpose

• The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.

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  Peter Medawar

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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• 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.

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  Peter Medawar

  "Memoir of a thinking radish: an autobiography". Book by Peter Medawar, Oxford University Press, p. 117, 1986.

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• I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.

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  Peter Medawar

  Peter Brian Medawar (1991). “The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists”, Oxford University Press, USA

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