Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Evolution

Quotes about: Evolution

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  In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Mean, Science, Apples

  Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes "Evolution as Fact and Theory" (1983)

• '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 exactly why it is false.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Teacher, Simple, Creation Science

• Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Keys, Agents, Evolution

• We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Atheist, Years, Ice

• 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

• The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Imagination, Design, Fossils

• Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Records, Fossils, Evolution

• 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

• The myriad valleys could have arisen anywhere on the landscape. The current positions are quite accidental. If we could repeat the experiment, we might obtain no valleys at all, or a completely different system. Yet we now stand at the shore line contemplating the fine spacing of valleys and their even contact with the sea. How easy it is to be misled and to assume that no other landscape could possibly have arisen.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Sea, Different, Valleys

• Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Views, Evolution, Adaptation

• I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Support, Borders

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.185, W. W. Norton & Company

• History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, History, Causes

• ... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Years, Opposites, Facts

• ... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Beauty, Stories, Evolution

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

• Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade — a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Tests, Evolution, Dogma

  "Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history".

• Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Horse, Time, People

• Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Air, Apples, Outcomes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

• If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Groups, Events, Looks

• 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

• Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Self, Arrogance, Ironic

• Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Orchids, Evolution, Made

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.20, W. W. Norton & Company

• Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Integrity, Clouds

  Stephen Jay GOULD, Stephen Jay Gould (2009). “Punctuated Equilibrium”, p.83, Harvard University Press

• Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Simple, Diversity

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.322, W. W. Norton & Company

• Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Evolution, Creation, Claims

• 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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