Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
Collection of top 97 famous quotes about Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Stephen Jay Gould quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous 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
Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.
— Stephen Jay Gould
No one-liner can ever be optimal.
— 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
All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
— 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
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
— 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
— 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
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
— 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
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
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
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
Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
— 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
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
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