Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Arguing

Quotes about: Arguing

• 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

  Struggle, Two, Usual

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

• [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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Animal, Discipline

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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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