Jay Gould Quotes

We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature. — Stephen Jay Gould

The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. — Stephen Jay Gould

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning. — Stephen Jay Gould

Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel. — Stephen Jay Gould

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. — Stephen Jay Gould

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent. — Stephen Jay Gould

The median isn't the message. — Stephen Jay Gould

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. — Stephen Jay Gould

Having the ability to get and gain respect through your work is great but you have to be careful not to get carried away. — Jay Gould

I do not believe that since man was in the habit of living on this planet anyone has ever lived possessed of the impudence of Jay Gould. — Jay Gould

Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. — Stephen Jay Gould

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence. — Stephen Jay Gould

We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner. — Stephen Jay Gould

No one-liner can ever be optimal. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. — Stephen Jay Gould

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. — Stephen Jay Gould

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ... — Stephen Jay Gould

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light. — Stephen Jay Gould

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it. — Stephen Jay Gould

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories. — Stephen Jay Gould

Duke est desipere in loco [it is pleasant to act foolishly from time to time - a line from Horace]. — Stephen Jay Gould

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. — Stephen Jay Gould

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers. — Stephen Jay Gould

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion. — Stephen Jay Gould

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing. — Stephen Jay Gould

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction. — Stephen Jay Gould

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years. — Stephen Jay Gould

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields. — Stephen Jay Gould

Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival. — Stephen Jay Gould

We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

Each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell. — Stephen Jay Gould

Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree. — Stephen Jay Gould

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. — Stephen Jay Gould

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. — Stephen Jay Gould

No compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism. — Stephen Jay Gould

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
— Stephen Jay Gould

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm. — Stephen Jay Gould

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion — Stephen Jay Gould

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

Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences. — Stephen Jay Gould

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight. — Stephen Jay Gould

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident. — Stephen Jay Gould

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation. — Stephen Jay Gould

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right. — Stephen Jay Gould

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without. — Stephen Jay Gould

Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis. — Stephen Jay Gould

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics. — Stephen Jay Gould

The median is not the message, — Stephen Jay Gould

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought. — Stephen Jay Gould

So much of science proceeds by telling stories. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons. — Stephen Jay Gould

We pass through this world but once. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. — Stephen Jay Gould

Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain. — Stephen Jay Gould

Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it. — Stephen Jay Gould

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology. — Stephen Jay Gould

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning. — Stephen Jay Gould

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism. — Stephen Jay Gould

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence ... I had to place myself amidst the variation. — Stephen Jay Gould

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity. — Stephen Jay Gould

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould — Jonathan Haidt

I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know. — Stephen Jay Gould

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. — Stephen Jay Gould

Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. — Stephen Jay Gould

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

Genius has as many components as the mind itself. — Stephen Jay Gould

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement — Stephen Jay Gould

Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality. — Stephen Jay Gould

[C]ontingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness. — Stephen Jay Gould

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive. — Stephen Jay Gould

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. — Stephen Jay Gould