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Ralph Vary Chamberlin Quotes

Ralph Vary Chamberlin was an American biologist, ethnographer, and historian from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was a faculty member of the University of Utah for over 25 years, where he helped establish the School of Medicine and served as its first dean, and later became head of the zoology department. He also taught at Brigham Young University and the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for over a decade at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he described species from around the world.

Chamberlin was a prolific taxonomist who named over 4,000 new animal species in over 400 scientific publications. He specialized in arachnids and myriapods , ranking among the most prolific arachnologists and myriapodologists in history. He described over 1,400 species of spiders, 1,000 species of millipedes, and the majority of North American centipedes, although the quantity of his output was not always matched with quality, leaving a mixed legacy to his successors. He also did pioneering ethnobiological studies with the Goshute and other indigenous people of the Great Basin, cataloging indigenous names and cultural uses of plants and animals. Chamberlin was celebrated by his colleagues at the University of Utah, however he was disliked among some arachnologists, including some of his former students. After retirement he continued to write, publishing on the history of education in his home state, especially that of the University of Utah.

Chamberlin was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . In the early twentieth century, Chamberlin was among a quartet of popular Mormon professors at Brigham Young University whose teaching of evolution and biblical criticism resulted in a 1911 controversy among University and Church officials, eventually resulting in the resignation of him and two other professors despite widespread support from the student body, an event described as Mormonism's "first brush with modernism". Wikipedia  

✵ 3. January 1879 – 31. October 1967
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Ralph Vary Chamberlin: 8   quotes 0   likes

Famous Ralph Vary Chamberlin Quotes

“As long as we go back often to Nature herself, and practice the art of then forgetting for the time the fictions and hypotheses necessary in the partial treatments of our specialities,—as long as we thereby allow Nature and her facts to speak to us for themselves,—so long shall we, after each fresh contact, return to our labors with renewed strength and clarified vision.”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

"Science and Reality" (1931) Bios Vol. 2, No. 1 , p. 40

“When we see men still so unhappily bound with prejudice and tradition that they are blind to the beauties and light of the grandest conception that science has yet won for man, we sorrow, and in sympathy again recall the plea that the unhappy Castelli made to the pope who was about to inflict punishment upon Galileo for his demonstration of the movements of the earth: "Your Holiness, nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from moving."”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

"Evolution and Theological Belief" (1911)

“The savage mind finds mysterious and arbitrary spiritual powers everywhere, in rivers and springs, inherent in the wind and rain, and presiding over the crops; but, with advance in civilization and the development of ordered knowledge, an ever wider compass is established as the for the reign of natural laws. Those who base their faith in God on the ever-receding miraculous phenomena, on the tacit assumption that human limitations prove the validity of religious interpretations, are ever pointing out some weak spots in the scientific web of cause and effect and saying "Here Science is baffled, and you must admit the need of God." But Science keeps extending her domain; and so the history of the thought of these men is the history of a continuous retreat. Their position is fundamentally a bad one because it makes God a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance, and justifies Reinach's definition of religion as a "sum of scruples impeding the free use of the human faculties."”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

No, the Creator must be seen as God of all Nature and of every natural law.
Life and Philosophy of W. H. Chamberlin (1925) pp.144-145

“Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles.”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

"The Kingdom of Man" https://archive.org/details/kingdomofman289cham (1938)

“Only the childish and immature mind can lose by learning that much in the Old Testament is poetical and that some of the stories are not true historically. Poetry is a superior medium for conveying religious truth.”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

"Some Early Hebrew Legends" (1910)

“The history of human progress is a story of emancipation, and its course has by no means been run. The future of the race is in all likelihood to be a scientific future, since science gives the truth needed in actual life and furnishes the means for advance, every achievement enlarging the field of subsequent possibilities. Nothing can stop this growth except suppressions of freedom.”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

"The Kingdom of Man" https://archive.org/details/kingdomofman289cham (1938)

“(E)ven within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

"Science and Reality" (1931) Bios Vol. 2, No. 1 , p. 39

“If you can bring me one student whose faith I have injured in Mormonism, I will bring you five that you, through your narrowness, have driven out of the church.”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

Response to BYU president George H. Brimhall, quoted in: Bergera, Gary James (1993). " The 1911 Evolution Controversy at Brigham Young University http://signaturebookslibrary.org/the-1911-evolution-controversy-at-brigham-young-university/". In: Sessions, Gene A.; Oberg, Craig J. The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism. Signature Books. p. 29

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