To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
Richard LewontinI think people who worry about planetary health on geological scales are totally misguided, that's not the point at all.
Richard LewontinPeople who have various kinds of politics for whom it is congenial for their apriority politics to say yes, things are getting much worse. They are opposed by people who also have a priori politics saying that this is the best of all possible worlds, capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread and you're just alarmists and so on and they can massage the data so it fits them.
Richard LewontinThe vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.
Richard LewontinThe general public doesn't know and probably doesn't care about punctuated equilibria nor indeed should they, or the greenhouse effect on some other planet - they barely have the ability to cope with the greenhouse effect on their own planet. So I think you have to distinguish between the broad visibility of a scientist when he or she is speaking to a general public and trying to address general issues and the continued position that a scientist may have into the history of a particular subject.
Richard LewontinWe take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism... We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Richard Lewontin