Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
-
Is uniformitarianism necessary?
→ -
No one-liner can ever be optimal.
→ -
[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.
→ -
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
→ -
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).
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
→ -
Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just as mightily in the service of wonder and the two elements are complementary, not independent or opposed. The thought fills me with awe - a mechanical contraption that could fit in the back of a pickup truck, traveling through space for twelve years, dodging around four giant bodies and their associated moons, and finally sending exquisite photos across more than four light-hours of space from the farthest planet in our solar system.
→ -
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
→ -
Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
→ -
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.
→ -
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
→ -
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.
→ -
Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
→ -
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.
→ -
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
→ -
But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.
→ -
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.
→ -
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
→ -
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
→ -
Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.
→ -
The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Simon Conway Morris University Professor -
Richard Lewontin Evolutionary Biologist -
Ernst Mayr Biologist -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Science writer -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Lynn Margulis Biologist -
Theodosius Dobzhansky Geneticist -
Alfred Russel Wallace Naturalist -
Michael Shermer Writer -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
Carl Linnaeus Botanist -
E. O. Wilson Biologist -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Ernst Haeckel Philosopher -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Oliver Sacks Neurologist -
Thomas Huxley Biologist -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Herbert Spencer Philosopher -
