From Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson lecture:

Hardly a day passes without a breathless science article in the press delivering to our waiting ears a fresh resemblance of chimp to man. But the discovery of chimapanzee religion has not yet been reported. Chimps receive names from human beings with equanimity, but do not give themselves names….Their greatest triumph, however, will be the achievement of science. For science, according to science, ought to be the most important attribute of human beings…[C]ollectively, science is the assertion of man over non-man, surely an unembarassed claim to importance and rule. Yet as individuals, scientists are anonymous factors in the scientific enterprise, each one substitutable for another. For all science cares, scientists could as well be numbered as named. We in the humanities will summon up the generosity to give them names.

Thanks to Peter Lawler at NLT.

Update: From a reader (at one of those fancy-pants science schools):

Jonah:
I of course am not Derb. As a scientist, however, I just love this line:
“For all science cares, scientists could as well be numbered as named.”
In this imperfect world there is, in fact, too much importance accorded to personalities in science. But I think most scientists on some level would acknowledge that Mansfield’s remark describes an ideal to which we try to live up. Valid science is valid science no matter who studied it; crap is still crap no matter how famous the scientist peddling it (though fame can certainly hinder its identification).
Something in that strikes me as profoundly conservative, even though most academic scientists tend lopsidedly toward left-liberalism. Thus you get a self-proclaimed proud leftist like the physicist Alan Sokal, tired of the politicized notion that everything can be deconstructed, publishing a hoax article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermaneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and commenting later, ”anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

Update: He quickly follows up:

Did I really just write you, “most academic scientists tend
lopsidedly…”?
Sigh. Sometimes I write redundantly, from time to time.