Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
Top 95 wise famous quotes and sayings by Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Stephen Jay Gould on Wise Famous Quotes.
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
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.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism
and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
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.
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
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.
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
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.
If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement