Top 100 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
#1. In biologist Stephen Jay Gould's illustrative phrase, human beings should be seen as a "tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush."14 That
Matthew Calarco
#2. Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould
Jonathan Haidt
#3. I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
Alan Lightman
#4. The first person to refer to Darwin's tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61
Tom Wolfe
#5. 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
#6. Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant S.O.B. like me, what comes naturally, you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done.
Stephen Jay Gould
#7. 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
#8. In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible ...
Stephen Jay Gould
#9. No compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.
Stephen Jay Gould
#10. The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Stephen Jay Gould
#11. In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.
Stephen Jay Gould
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well?
Stephen Jay Gould
#16. With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
Stephen Jay Gould
#17. The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.
Stephen Jay Gould
#18. No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
#19. The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
Stephen Jay Gould
#20. [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.
Stephen Jay Gould
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.
Stephen Jay Gould
#25. What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
Stephen Jay Gould
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.
Stephen Jay Gould
#31. Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.
Stephen Jay Gould
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
Stephen Jay Gould
#35. 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
#36. Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film ...
Stephen Jay Gould
#37. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.
Stephen Jay Gould
#38. 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
#39. Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.
Stephen Jay Gould
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
#44. 'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.
Stephen Jay Gould
#45. God was there when it happened. We were not there ... Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this information is in His written Word.
Stephen Jay Gould
#46. Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...
Stephen Jay Gould
#47. Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.
Stephen Jay Gould
#48. 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
#49. Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.
Stephen Jay Gould
#50. 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
#52. The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#53. Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.
Stephen Jay Gould
#55. 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
#56. The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Stephen Jay Gould
#57. If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.
Stephen Jay Gould
#58. Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
Stephen Jay Gould
#59. 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
#60. [Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
#61. People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs to them that if they're asking for it and another thousand people are asking, I don't have 1,000 five minutes to give.
Stephen Jay Gould
#62. Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.
Stephen Jay Gould
#63. 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
#64. If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Stephen Jay Gould
#65. Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
Stephen Jay Gould
#66. We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
Stephen Jay Gould
#67. A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.
Stephen Jay Gould
#68. The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).
Stephen Jay Gould
#69. World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
Stephen Jay Gould
#70. History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
#71. Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
Stephen Jay Gould
#72. If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
Stephen Jay Gould
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
Stephen Jay Gould
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.
Stephen Jay Gould
#79. 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
#80. We must categorize and simplify in order to comprehend. But the reduction of complexity entails a great danger, since the line between enlightening epitome and vulgarized distortion is so fine.
Stephen Jay Gould
#81. I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.
Stephen Jay Gould
#82. 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
#83. Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.
Stephen Jay Gould
#84. 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
#85. Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
Stephen Jay Gould
#86. Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#87. Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
Stephen Jay Gould
#89. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
Stephen Jay Gould
#90. The human mind delights in finding pattern - so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Stephen Jay Gould
#91. The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
Stephen Jay Gould
#92. I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers.
Stephen Jay Gould
#93. We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of "easy listening".
Stephen Jay Gould
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
Stephen Jay Gould
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
