Stephen Jay Gould Quotes - Page 4

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• [G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make "novelty seeking" or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Long, Doe, Enzymes

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Fascination, Details, Holiness

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “I Have Landed”, p.47, Harvard University Press

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• Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Facts, Serious, Way

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• [T]ruly grand and powerful theories [...] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [...] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Brother, Powerful, Dad

  "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Mr. Sophia's Pony", p. 155, 1998.

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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

  Pathways, Events, Alternatives

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Integrity, Intellectual, Add

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.315, Harvard University Press

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• Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Powerful, Silly, Men

  Stephen Jay Gould (1999). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Three Rivers Press (CA)

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• We pass through this world but once.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Kindness, Helping Others, Giving

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.30, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: 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, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Soul, Progress, Pedestal

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327, 1995.

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• The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Brain, Survival, Essentials

  "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48 - 49, 1987.

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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

  Hate, Writing, Done

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• Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Psychics, People

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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• How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like Galileo. Universities or governments have become patrons only in the last few generations. Many of the great scientists of the past were in debt to their patrons in the same sense that modern scientists are influenced by what their granting agencies want.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Lucky, Get Money

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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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

  Sticks, Talent, Insight

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• Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Facts, Evolution

  Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

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• It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Children, Octopus, Eight

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.206, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Fall, Errors, Interaction With Others

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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

  Simple, Pool Table, Way

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.16, W. W. Norton & Company

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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

  Our World, Two, Mind

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "A Special Fondness for Beetles", pp. 386-387, 1995.

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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

  Odd, Biology, Adaptation

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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

  Doe, Claims, Attributes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.155, Harvard University Press

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• The median isn't the message.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Messages, Statistician, Median

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.233, Harvard University Press

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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

  Morning, Long, Ignorant

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.305, W. W. Norton & Company

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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

  Pain, Cancer, Men

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.47, Harvard University Press

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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 why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage-good teaching-than a bill forcing our honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Teacher, Teaching, Science

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