Scientific Progress Quotes

“many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. “It’s ironic,” she told me. “The Moore court’s concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired—it just handed that commercial value to researchers.” According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn’t prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery.”
― Rebecca Skloot

“Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.”
― Shelby D. Hunt, Marketing Theory: Foundations, Controversy, Strategy, and Resource-Advantage Theory

“When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“It is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own time who make these discoveries. The Surgeon-General of the Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from his commission of medical officers, but the conclusions of the Board turned out to be all wrong, while he did not notice the report from his own subordinate, Dr. H. R. Carter, which turned out to be pure gold and was one of the great steps in establishing the true method of the transmission of Yellow Fever.”
― William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama

“Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.”
― Paul Sabatier

“The evils of life spring partly from natural causes, partly from men’s hostility to each other. In former times, competition and war were necessary for the securing of food, which could only be obtained by the victors. Now, owing to the mastery of natural forces which science has begun to give, there would be more comfort and happiness for all if all devoted themselves to the conquest of Nature rather than of each other. The representation of Nature as a friend, and sometimes as even an ally in our struggles with other men, obscures the true position of man in the world, and diverts his energies from the pursuit of scientific power, which is the only fight that can bring long-continued well-being to the human race.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Silicon Psychos (The Sonnet)

If we cared more about the hard problem of real inhumanity,
And less about the fictitious hard problem of consciousness,
We'd have filled the world with human consciousness already,
Instead of still fighting for basic rights against base biases.
What kind of a moron goes walkabout when their home is on fire,
What kind of a moron abandons the living chasing life on silicon!
We really gotta take a hard look at our habits and priorities,
Dreaming is good, but dream devoid of life is but degeneration.
Chimps driving teslas are still chimps no matter the demagoguery,
All intelligence is disgrace if it's unaware of human condition.
A heartless organism living on silicon is no different,
From a heartless organism living in a carbon based human.
Be it crucifix or code, in savage hands every tool is weapon.
The wise use AI to design prosthetics, savages for transhumanism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“We urgently need to find ways to push scientific and technological progress in directions that are likely to bring us good, and away from those directions that spell doom. This cannot be done if we stick to the erroneous view that all such progress is good for us. The first thing we need is to be able to distinguish those advances whose potential is most in the direction of prosperity and human flourishing from those whose potential is more in the direction of destruction and doom, and we need to find safe ways to handle those technologies that come with elements of both. Our ability to do so today is very limited, my ambition with this book is to draw attention to the problem, so that we can work together to improve, and avoid running blindfolded at full speed into a dangerous future.”
― Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity

“Since the notion of quality, as understood by [the Swedish Research Council], is supposed to ignore practical applicability, quality as the sole selection criterion means that we value the production of new knowledge and its own right, rather than just a means towards attaining other goals. I have long been – and still am – highly sympathetic to this romantic view of knowledge and intellectual achievements. To improve our understanding of the world we live in really is one of the most magnificent and worthy the goals of human activity one can think of. And yet, it is not the only worthy goal. A bright future for humanity, where everyone has the best possible prospects of leading a happy and prosperous life, and where such things as poverty, pain and misery are reduced to a minimum, seems like another goal worth striving for, at least as important as the quest for ever-increasing knowledge.”
― Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity

“Evolution occurred in scientific progress as it happened in nature: a positive trait was passed along, then proliferated; obsolete characteristics withered away, and the technology and the organization evolved into something new.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“We Are The Scientists
(Sonnet 1214)

Justifying human rights violation as
necessary evil may be habit of politicians.
Scientists must be wiser than that, otherwise,
Science is just a weapon of mass destruction.

Scientist without humanity is anything but scientist,
Science without humanity is anything but science.
Civilized scientists work for the progress of humanity,
Primitive scientists work for the progress of science.

Progress of science is not necessarily progress of humanity,
Particularly when science advances trampling human life.
World leaders may brush off such matter as collateral,
To a scientist with spine nothing is higher than human life.

Whole world is in our care, beyond all law and politics.
We are capable, we are accountable - we are the scientists!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“He felt sad, angry and sorry. It was impossible to let the people benefit fully from scientific and ideological progress without first raising the level of cultural awareness of the masses. They had to discard all the traditional molds that were still narrowing their minds.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp