Stephen Jay Gould Quotes - Page 5

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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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• 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

  Pathways, Adaptation, Advantage

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• The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Tree, Branches, Tiny

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History".

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• No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Creativity, Science

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Subconscious, Wells, Just Do It

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lying, Foundation, Evolution

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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

  Work, Passion, Skills

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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

  Cities, People, Political

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.183, W. W. Norton & Company

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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

  World, Evolution, Fit

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

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• If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human accomplishment, may we not all pledge to avoid the silly censoring that can lead to a codification of Orwell's Newspeak? Consider John Milton's reasons for why good arguments are often lost: 'For want of words, no doubt, or lack of breath!'

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Integrity, Silly, Issues

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  World, Signals, Perceive

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.313, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. ( Aristotle , and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Kings, Views, Two

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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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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• 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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Independent, Moon, Light

  "Bully for Brontosaurus". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "The Horn of Triton", pp. 508 - 509, 1991.

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• If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated and must not be condemned by genetic speculation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophical, People, Liberty

  Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.267, 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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• 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

  Generations, Paleontology, Fields

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• Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Feelings, Confusing, World

  "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Chance Riches", p. 342, 1983.

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• The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Events, Stories, History Of Life

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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

  Religion, Evolution, Nonsense

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Our World, Perfection

  "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Only His Wings Remained", p. 54, 1985.

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• Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Men, Track, Heaven

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  World, Theory, Complexes

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Humble, Intelligent, Statistics

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Average, Atheism

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