Humble scientists with a sense of wonder

I am tired of reading creationist accusations that scientists are robotic, dogmatic and unfeeling know-it-alls, unredeemable determinists incapable of having any sense of wonder regarding the world. This general accusation that scientists lack any sense of wonder is untrue based upon my own acquaintance with scientists who I know personally as well as those who I know through published writings and videos.

It is certainly true that some particular scientists express themselves with the precision that is devoid of emotion. It is true that some scientists are dogmatic and reductionistic. The same can be said for professionals in any field. The same can be said for most creationists, whose writings display in obedience to perceived authority and a refusal to open their minds to new evidence.

I am creating this page for the sole purpose of collecting writings of scientists who have expressed themselves on scientific topics with humility and wonder. I will jumpstart this page with several quotes, and I invite others to contribute additional quotations in order to create a page to which we can point whenever we hear unfair accusations directed at scientists.

Douglas Futuyma, from Evolutionary Biology, Third Edition, page xviii (1998)

Do not expect to find many pat, dogmatic answers or simple declarations of fact in this book. Very often, the exposition of a topic builds slowly and carefully toward a conclusion, and sometimes the conclusion is that we do not know which of several hypotheses best accounts for our observations. In evolutionary biology, as

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Does Bush have ‘presenile dementia’?

Long before political Bush-bashing became popular, or even widely accepted, critics still jabbed him repeatedly for his speech. Books of "Bushisms", videos of Bush's misspeakings spliced together, and comedic reproductions of the man's halting, confused language have always dominated the pop culture reception of the President. I use the word…

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Dawkins cuts Behe apart and throws him to the dogs

This NYT article by Richard Dawkins is just too much fun to not read. And when I mentioned "dogs," I meant it.  If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change [as Behe argues], this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly…

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