A Quote by Wilhelm Johannsen

This constitution we designate by the word genotype. The word is entirely independent of any hypothesis; it is fact, not hypothesis that different zygotes arising by fertilisation can thereby have different qualities, that, even under quite similar conditions of life, phenotypically diverse individuals can develop.

Wilhelm Johannsen

Quote Topics

Any Arising Conditions Constitution Develop Different Diverse Entirely Even Fact Hypothesis Independent Individuals Life Qualities Quite Similar Thereby Word

Quote Author

Wilhelm Johannsen
Danish - Botanist
February 3, 1857 - November 11, 1927

The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a "hypothesis," but the word "hypothesis," though euphonious, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word "guess." If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word "hypothesis." When it is understood that "hypothesis" means "guess," people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it.

William Jennings Bryan

[Coining phrase "null hypothesis"] In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the "null hypothesis," and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

Ronald Fisher

It's not like you're closing the old doors and that investigators working away in a laboratories on a unique hypothesis are no longer needed. My gosh, they are indeed. But this becomes a real engine for hypothesis generation and even for proof if you have interventions that you can carry out in this kind of large scale and conduct them in a rigorous way. I guess, yeah, it's different. But it's different in a good way.

Francis Collins

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

William Kingdon Clifford

If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.

John Maynard Keynes

Mr. Darwin's hypothesis is not, so far as I am aware, inconsistent with any known biological fact; on the contrary, if admitted, the facts of Development, of Comparative Anatomy, of Geographical Distribution, and of Palaeontology, become connected together, and exhibit a meaning such as they never possessed before; and I, for one, am fully convinced that if not precisely true, that hypothesis is as near an approximation to the truth as, for example, the Copernican hypothesis was to the true theory of the planetary motions.

Thomas Huxley

However the machine would permit us to test the hypothesis for any special value of n. We could carry out such tests for a sequence of consecutive values n=2,3,.. up to, say, n=100. If the result of at least one test were negative, the hypothesis would prove to be false; otherwise our confidence in the hypothesis would increase, and we should feel encouraged to attempt establishing the hypothesis, instead of trying to construct a counterexample.

Alfred Tarski

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

Thomas Huxley

But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis... The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.

James Clerk Maxwell

This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis, but it satisfies the conditions of a legitimate hypothesis, by postulating the operation of no unknown or uncertain cause, but only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

William Robertson Smith

This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.

W. R. Thompson

My writing is an answer to the partisans of the many and it returns their attack with interest, with a view to showing that the hypothesis of the many, if examined sufficiently in detail, leads to even more ridiculous results than the hypothesis of the One.

Zeno of Elea

Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they'd have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of "likelihood" used in statistics.

Elliott Sober

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.