Whenever Darwin encountered a “published fact” or “new observation” that contradicted one of his beliefs, he forced himself to “make a memorandum of it without fail and at once.” Why did Darwin do this? Because he had “found by experience that such facts and thoughts” – those inconvenient ideas – “were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.
Whatever you think of Jonah Lehrer’s apology, this is a wonderful little tidbit. I wonder, though, if Darwin really did this “without fail”?
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