I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.
Richard LewontinQuantification, experimentation, rigor, repetition, prediction - all of these are part of the experimental sciences. There's an iconography also namely man, and I do mean males in white coats who spin dials and wait for numbers to appear.
Richard LewontinAs an American I must say I haven't been very encouraged by the way in which the people who run the government in the United States have been listening to those contrary voices. And so long as the power to run the world lies in the hands of people who are quite happy to see it get warmer, or fuel be used more, then would those people who oppose it are crying in the wilderness - that's the real problem.
Richard LewontinIf I ask you who is the most famous scientist who ever lived, or the greatest scientist who ever lived you'll say either Einstein or Newton or something like that because their claims were supposed to apply universally. But the claim of somebody who is studying a particular feature of the evolutionary process like whether it's very fast or very slow, or occurs in steps and so on, that's not a universal claim, that's a rather specialised claim and so you can't claim to great fame and great success.
Richard Lewontin