Science Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is needling a blind spot in certain hard-nosed versions of Darwinism: they can explain how traits spread, but often grow strangely quiet about how genuinely new ideas arrive. By insisting that theories of evolution must "provide for the creative acts" that produced them, he turns the scientific spotlight back onto science itself. If evolution is the master key for explaining complex order, then the emergence of the human mind capable of inventing that master key is not a side note; it's part of the phenomenon being explained.

The line works because it’s a trap disguised as a reasonable demand. Polanyi isn’t saying evolution is false; he’s saying an account that reduces cognition to mechanical selection pressures risks sawing off the branch it sits on. Scientific theorizing depends on judgment, imagination, and a felt sense of "this fits" before it can be proved - capacities Polanyi famously grouped under "tacit knowledge". Those aren’t easily translated into the language of algorithmic inevitability. So the subtext is a warning against a certain imperial confidence: if you describe human knowing as nothing but a byproduct, you may also demote the authority of the very reasoning that produced your description.

Context matters. Writing in the mid-20th century, Polanyi watched both ideological systems and scientific fashions claim total explanatory power. His pushback isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-reductionism. He’s arguing for a thicker picture of rationality, one where creativity is not an embarrassing leak in the machine but a real feature of how truth gets made visible.