I found something at Wikipedia. It’s quite amusing.
The entry is: Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?
“Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” is a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot of 1735, which has entered common use and has become associated with more recent figures.
Ah – has it? Who’s that then?
… Read the restThe philosopher Mary Midgley used a variation on the phrase in an article in the journal Philosophy written to counter a review praising The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where she cuttingly said that she had “not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel.” Dawkins replied that this statement would be “hard to match, in reputable