Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Miller

By the time someone chooses science, Miller suggests, the decisive experiment has already happened offstage. The line is brisk, almost dismissive, and that’s the point: it punctures the romantic story that science is a purely meritocratic pipeline where training manufactures a “scientific mind.” Instead, Miller frames science as an identity club with a bouncer at the door: temperament, confidence with abstraction, tolerance for boredom, childhood encouragement, class expectations, even a taste for certain kinds of status have already done their quiet sorting.

Coming from an entertainer who moved easily across medicine, theater, and public intellectual life, the remark carries a sly outsider-insider authority. Miller isn’t attacking scientists so much as demystifying them. The subtext is that we overcredit “the system” (schools, labs, grants) for producing scientists and undercredit the earlier cultural forces that decide who feels entitled to claim that title. It also hints at a selection bias in how science represents “human nature”: if the people who opt in skew toward particular personalities and backgrounds, then the questions science asks, the methods it prizes, and the behaviors it rewards will reflect that skew.

The intent is corrective, even a little mischievous. It’s a reminder that science doesn’t just discover truths; it also reproduces a social type. If you want more scientists, or different science, you don’t start at the PhD. You start at the moment a kid decides whether this world is “for people like me.”