Memories as a subject of reflection and creativity
The article discusses some aspects of the memoirs as a source in the history of science. On the example of a number of major biologists' memories and on base of personal experience in this genre, the aims and motives of memoirs authors as well as their ineradicable subjectivity, selectivity, bias and so on are analyzed. It is proved that the value of memories is, above all, that they give an insight into the inner world of the narrator. The reminiscence is not a simple return to the past with a view to understand it and even to synthesize it with the present. Rather, it is a method to reconstruct the life track in order to break into the future and try to keep in the memory of the descendants of ourselves and our time in a way as it seems be preferable for memoirist. However, thanks to the memoirs, the motives of scientific work processes, organization and institutionalization of science, also in the field of evolutionary theory and its history, become more apparent.