Quotes: Explanations

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

There are no explanations, there are no answers.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.

In business, words are words; explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality.