When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can answer. That is, it is often the case that the operations of a science are not a consequence of the problematic of that science, but that the problematic is induced by the available means.
Interpretation
Difficult questions often lead to simpler inquiries that can be answered, making researchers more likely to pursue those instead.
Richard Lewontin's quote highlights that when scientists confront challenging issues, they tend to redirect their focus to questions that are more manageable, avoiding the complexity of the original problem. This leads to the idea that the limitations in how science operates are often shaped not just by the problems themselves, but by the tools and methods available to researchers, thereby altering the direction and depth of scientific inquiry.
In practice
In a lecture on scientific inquiry, to illustrate the importance of formulating the right questions.
The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of .. Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism... We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
Now I know what the atom looks like.
Universe consists of frozen light.
In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down.
Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.
The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.
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