Retrospective Quotes (4 quotes)
Contrary to the legend, Darwin's finches do not appear to have inspired his earliest theoretical views on evolution, even after he finally became an evolutionist in 1837; rather it was his evolutionary views that allowed him, retrospectively, to understand the complex case of the finches.
Quoted in Stephen Gould, The Flamingo's Smile (1987), 356. From Frank J. Sulloway, 'Darwin's Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and its Aftermath'. Journal of the History of Biology (1982), 15, 327-398.
I want to argue that the ‘sudden’ appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it ... Evolutionary ‘sequences’ are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.
…...
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe.
Opening sentences of his first published book (at first, anonymously), 'Introduction', Nature (1836), 5.
To err is to be as though truth did not exist. To lay bare the error to oneself and others is retrospective discovery.
In The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe (1906), 186.
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) -- 
