Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Stephen Jay Gould, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Stephen Jay Gould quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 220 Stephen Jay Gould quotes for you to read and share.

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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
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Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again - finally turning into an expectation - then theories are overturned. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each ... -- Stephen Jay Gould
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[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
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No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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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
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[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence ... I had to place myself amidst the variation. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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Evolution is an obstacle course not a freeway; the correct analogue for long-term success is a distant punt receiver evading legions of would-be tacklers in an oddly zigzagged path toward a goal, not a horse thundering down the flat. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Genius has as many components as the mind itself. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We pass through this world but once. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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No compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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'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
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Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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Common sense is a very poor guide to scientific insight for it represents cultural prejudice more often than it reflects the native honesty of a small boy before the naked emperor. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs! -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -or any honest intellectual inquiry. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution? -- Stephen Jay Gould
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It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes human judgement and ingenuity upon all proceedings. It is, after all (although we sometimes forget it), practiced by humans. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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No one-liner can ever be optimal. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Duke est desipere in loco [it is pleasant to act foolishly from time to time - a line from Horace]. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion? -- Stephen Jay Gould
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What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ... -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity). -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The median is not the message, -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time ... -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality). -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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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
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Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating ... second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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So much of science proceeds by telling stories. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The world is full of signals that we don't perceive. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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The median isn't the message. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Current utility and historical origin are different subjects. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos -- Stephen Jay Gould
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If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range ... -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
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Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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[C]ontingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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If Ediacara survivors had been able to evolve internal complexity later on, then the pathways from this radically different starting point would have produced a world worthy of science fiction at its best. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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Any human being is really g<>ong>oong><>ong>oong>d at certain things. The pr<>ong>oong>blem is that the things y<>ong>oong>u're g<>ong>oong><>ong>oong>d at c<>ong>oong>me naturally. And since m<>ong>oong>st pe<>ong>oong>ple are pretty m<>ong>oong>dest instead <>ong>oong>f an arr<>ong>oong>gant S.O.B. like me, what c<>ong>oong>mes naturally, y<>ong>oong>u d<>ong>oong>n't see as a special skill. It's just y<>ong>oong>u. It's what y<>ong>oong>u've always d<>ong>oong>ne. -- Stephen Jay Gould