Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Observation

Quotes about: Observation

• No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Creativity, Science

• In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Rocks, Records

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.105, W. W. Norton & Company

• Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Strong, Science, Giving

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.155, Harvard University Press

• When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Wise, Long, Soul

• I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Evolution, Theory, Observation

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.256, W. W. Norton & Company

• Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Law, Data

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 279, 1989.

• [T]ruly grand and powerful theories [...] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [...] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Brother, Powerful, Dad

  "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Mr. Sophia's Pony", p. 155, 1998.

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