17 quotes
The bond of sympathy, like the artist's eye for beauty, may stretch across many divisions.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Reduced to the statistical permutations of genes, life became "nothing but" the marriage of chance and selection.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
We are discovering that natural philosophy needs bonds of sympathy as well as precision of intellect.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
The macho is in the metaphors, not the phenomena.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
It now requires such artful speculation to maintain an orthodox faith in chance. Skeptics, it would seem, are willing to believe anything.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
The process of apoptosis by which life and development are governed is profoundly communal. ...Cells ...need to be "encouraged" to live.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Until we have freed our minds and emotions of the hidden presuppositions that stand between us and the world, we can never be certain we are in touch with reality.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Some Calvinist divines identified an "idol" as anything "feigned in the mind by imagination." There is a haunting similarity between such teachings and Galileo's bold attack upon what he called "secondary qualities" in nature.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Women enter the sciences, but "womanliness"—those qualities that have always been stereotypically attributed to females—is not yet entirely welcome, whether it comes into the laboratory wearing pants or a skirt.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Science, in broad outline, can be divided into three parts: the study of the vast, the study of the tiny, and the study of life which... acts as audience to both the vast and the tiny.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Goethe wondered at what point our instruments might be creating what we think we see out there in the world. ...his question is still a good one. Every science of observation must take care not to get lost among its own artifacts.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Because girls are raised to specialize in a certain set of human characteristics, would they not, then, bring to science a different sensibility? Does that sensibility have the right to be represented in science—or, for that matter, in business, politics, law, or medicine?
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
In four centuries of taking wealth and comfort from the body of the Earth, modern science has not troubled to produce a single rite or ritual, not even a minor prayer, that asks pardon or gives thanks. But then what sense would it make to ask anything of a dead body?
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
You and I, whole human beings, are, so Richard Dawkins insists, merely "survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." At its most fundamental level, he finds the living universe populated by John Wayne genetics and Clint Eastwood chemicals.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
When theoretical physicists censor the public's spontaneous visualizing response by warning us we must not try to picture the underlying nature of the world, whether atoms or quarks or preons, they are drawing upon an intellectual discipline devised by Calvin. Reality is beyond the senses; only the rigorously logical mind, leaping bravely into the intangible, can grasp it. No images.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
When it is another human being who is being... objectified, everybody (except the rapist) can clearly see the act as a crime. But when we objectify the natural world, turning it into a dead or stupid thing, we have another word for that. Science.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)
Here, at the birth of modern science, is a fundamental insight. Our knowledge of nature Out There begins with knowledge of ourselves In Here. Until we have freed our minds and emotions of the hidden presuppositions that stand between us and the world, we can never be certain we are in touch with reality.
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999)