There is no more humbling yet supremely joyful experience for a biologist than to have his presumptuous ideas corrected by a simple fact of nature. His curiosity about how living systems work lures him into following the faintest of clues, and when the trail seems to disappear he builds hypotheses, often one upon another. Hypotheses are really a form of wishful thinking; they evaporate when facts of actual events bring one face-to-face with reality. Yet, without hypotheses and wishful thinking life would be intolerably dull.
-Kenneth Roeder
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (1976)
