Top 100 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
#1. I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.
Stephen Jay Gould
#2. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould
#3. The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Stephen Jay Gould
#4. But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?
Stephen Jay Gould
#5. The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
#6. We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
Stephen Jay Gould
#7. No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
#8. Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.
Stephen Jay Gould
#9. Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#10. A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.
Stephen Jay Gould
#11. Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run.
Stephen Jay Gould
#12. Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.
Stephen Jay Gould
#13. Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
Stephen Jay Gould
#14. No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call temperament.
Stephen Jay Gould
#15. People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
Stephen Jay Gould
#16. Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into two categories: items purchasable for supposed pleasure (such as alcohol), and illicit drugs.
Stephen Jay Gould
#17. I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.
Stephen Jay Gould
#18. If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
Stephen Jay Gould
#19. The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the "liberal" rhetoric of "equal time." But mistake it not.
Stephen Jay Gould
#20. I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).
Stephen Jay Gould
#21. Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
#22. The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.
Stephen Jay Gould
#23. We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes - one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
Stephen Jay Gould
#25. My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould
#26. Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.
Stephen Jay Gould
#27. My potential salvation ... must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha"
while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.
Stephen Jay Gould
#28. If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Stephen Jay Gould
#29. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
Stephen Jay Gould
#30. A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.
Stephen Jay Gould
#31. World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
Stephen Jay Gould
#32. Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.
Stephen Jay Gould
#33. The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: "They still call it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore."
Stephen Jay Gould
#34. Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
Stephen Jay Gould
#35. Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).
Stephen Jay Gould
#36. An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.
Stephen Jay Gould
#37. I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
Stephen Jay Gould
#38. Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
Stephen Jay Gould
#39. Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.
Stephen Jay Gould
#40. The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.
Stephen Jay Gould
#41. Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
Stephen Jay Gould
#42. Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#44. Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline ... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
Stephen Jay Gould
#45. Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
Stephen Jay Gould
#46. There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon.
Stephen Jay Gould
#47. Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
Stephen Jay Gould
#48. If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#49. The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.
Stephen Jay Gould
#50. I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.
Stephen Jay Gould
#51. It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.
Stephen Jay Gould
#52. We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
Stephen Jay Gould
#54. Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
Stephen Jay Gould
#55. Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
Stephen Jay Gould
#56. The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
#58. All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
Stephen Jay Gould
#59. Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
#60. If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.
Stephen Jay Gould
#61. Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.
Stephen Jay Gould
#62. Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.
Stephen Jay Gould
#63. We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
Stephen Jay Gould
#64. The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.
Stephen Jay Gould
#65. I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.
Stephen Jay Gould
#66. We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
Stephen Jay Gould
#67. What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Stephen Jay Gould
#68. People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.
Stephen Jay Gould
#69. History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.
Stephen Jay Gould
#70. In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.
Stephen Jay Gould
#71. The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos
Stephen Jay Gould
#72. We must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
Stephen Jay Gould
#74. We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.
Stephen Jay Gould
#75. Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#76. The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould
#77. Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism
and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Stephen Jay Gould
#78. Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
Stephen Jay Gould
#79. Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
#80. [T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.
Stephen Jay Gould
#81. Evolution is an obstacle course not a freeway; the correct analogue for long-term success is a distant punt receiver evading legions of would-be tacklers in an oddly zigzagged path toward a goal, not a horse thundering down the flat.
Stephen Jay Gould
#82. Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.
Stephen Jay Gould
#83. Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.
Stephen Jay Gould
#84. Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance.
Stephen Jay Gould
#85. We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
Stephen Jay Gould
#86. Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#87. This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#88. I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.
Stephen Jay Gould
#89. The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.
Stephen Jay Gould
#90. If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done what I have.
Stephen Jay Gould
#91. The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Stephen Jay Gould
#92. The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
Stephen Jay Gould
#93. I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
Stephen Jay Gould
#94. We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright.
Stephen Jay Gould
#95. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.
Stephen Jay Gould
#96. Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.
Stephen Jay Gould
#98. You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould
#100. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.
Stephen Jay Gould
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