Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Imagination

Quotes about: Imagination

• 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

• Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Artist, Animal

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

• Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Reality, Self, Organization

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.428, W. W. Norton & Company

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