A força da curiosidade
Um belo excerto de Stephen Jay Gould sobre a curiosidade como força por detrás da evolução das ideias na espécie humana. Ser de ciências não se deve desligar de ter uma cultura mais ampla. A poesia da ciência deve muito a essa capacidade para a fascinação, separada de qualquer objectivo de aplicação.
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I recognize this functional need to know, and I surely honor it as a driving force in human history. But when Paleolithic Og looked out of his cave and up at the heavens — and asked why the moon had phases, not because he could use the information to boost his success in gathering shellfish at the nearby shore, but because he sensed, however dimly, that something we might call recurrent order, and regard as beautiful for this reason alone, must lie behind the overt pattern — so did humanity as well.
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SJGould (1997). In: Questioning the millennium. A rationalist's guide to a precisely arbitrary countdown, Harmony Books, New York, p. 157.