From Pluto's Republic, Oxford University Press, 1984.
"If a broad demarkation is drawn between the natural sciences and what can only be described as the unnatural sciences, it will at once be recognised as a distinguishing mark of the latter that their practitioners try most painstakingly to imitate what they believe - quite wrongly, alas for them - to be the distinctive manners and observances of the natural sciences. Among these are:
a) a belief that measurement and numeration are intrisically praiseworthy activities (the worship, indeed, of what Ernst Gombrech calls idola quantitatis
b) the whole discredited farrago of inductivism - especially the belief that facts are prior to ideas and that a sufficiently voluminous compilation of facts can be processed by a calculus of discovery in such a way as to yield general principles and natural-seeming laws
c) another distinguishing mark of unnatural scientists is their faith in the efficacy of statistical formulae, particularly when processed by a computer - the use of which is in itself interpreted as a mark of scientific manhood.
There is no need to cause offence by specifying the unnatural sciences, for the practitioners will recognise themselves easily: the shoe belongs where it fits."
Peter Medewar was one of the leading immunologists of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medcine in 1960 for his discoveries about why transplants are rejected. He was also a witty and acerbic writer on science and its relationship to society, and was particularly cutting about such pseudosciences as psychoanalysis, futurology, social darwinism and mystical scientists of the Teillard de Chardin mould. Definately worth reading if only for his wonderful put-downs.