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Conflicting views and contrasting ideas are the essence of all great debates throughout history, from the Greeks to the Oxford Union Debating Society. Today, we turn to television for the creative clash of ideas on matters that touch our lives.

But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates.

In the present epoch of struggle between two worlds the two opposing and antagonistic trends penetrating the foundations of nearly all branches of biology are particularly sharply defined.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I sometimes feel that I have been born to attract controversy.

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

Luckily for writers - and unluckily for history - every scientific idea creates human conflict.

Too often new ideas are studied and analyzed until they are suffocated.

At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.

Indeed science alone may perhaps be sterile when pursued without an understanding of the world in which scientific knowledge is created and in which the fruits of science are used.