Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Intellectual, Culture

  1990 In The Independent, 24 Jan.

• We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of "easy listening".

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Listening, Culture, Information

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

• 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

• Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Opportunity, Sound, Analysis

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

• The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental" production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Different, Culture, Environment

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

• 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.

• Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Technology, Differences

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