Stephen Jay Gould quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stephen Jay Gould on Wise Famous Quotes.

We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.

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

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.

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

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

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.

The median isn't the message.

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

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

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

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

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

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

I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

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

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

Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.

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.

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

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

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.

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

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

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

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

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

Each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

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.

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

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

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

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

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.

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

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

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

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

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

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

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

No compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

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

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

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

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

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

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism
and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

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

Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.

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

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

The median is not the message,

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

We pass through this world but once.

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.

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

Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case.

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.

I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.

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

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

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

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

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.

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

Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.

We must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

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

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.

If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.

Genius has as many components as the mind itself.

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

Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

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

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.

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.

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.