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David Quammen
(1948 - )
writer whose science, nature and travel articles have been published in magazines like National Geographic and Outside. For the latter, for fifteen years he contibuted the column, Natural Acts.
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Science Quotes by David Quammen (2 quotes)
[Alfred Russell] Wallace's sales agent, back in London, heard mutterings from some naturalists that young Mr. Wallace ought to quit theorizing and stick to gathering facts. Besides expressing their condescension toward him in particular, that criticism also reflected a common attitude that fact-gathering, not theory, was the proper business of all naturalists.
— David Quammen
In The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (1996), 41.
[Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That’s what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally—taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.
— David Quammen
In 'Was Darwin Wrong?', National Geographic (Nov 2004), 206, 4.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
