Abstract
“ALL useless science is an empty boast,” Shakespeare is alleged to have said, but he lived before that pernicious cleavage had been made between pure science and economic science, which suggests, as Hinton once said, that the latter is a gold-digger while the former excavates only knowledge. And while we are strongly in favour of those lines of scientific endeavour which make their first purpose an attack upon the evils that man and his possessions fall heir to in the course of Nature, and which aim at easing the human struggle for existence, there are questions of no immediate practical moment to which the inquiring spirit of humanity demands an answer. I do not think Shakespeare would have called these recurrent problems “useless science”, for the mind of man requires satisfaction as well as his material need.
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RITCHIE, J. Perspectives in Evolution*. Nature 144, 534–538 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144534a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144534a0