Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Biology

Quotes about: Biology

• 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

  Peace, Interesting, People

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.151, W. W. Norton & Company

• Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Home, Average, Taught Us

  Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.147, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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

  Science, Essence, Differences

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.36, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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

  Culture, Recognition, Biology

• 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

• The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Merit, Argument, Biology

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