Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Progress

Quotes about: Progress

• The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Understanding, Progress

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.173, Harvard University Press

• World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Views, Perception, Progress

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

• Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Failure, Science, Errors

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.163, Harvard University Press

• The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Progress, Expansion

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

• Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Science, Progress

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

• Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Climate, Principles

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Littles, Tiny

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?" (p. 327), 1995.

• Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Block, Design, Progress

• Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Facts, Evolution

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

• The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lying, Persistence, Keys

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural History”, p.396, Random House

• I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Soul, Progress, Pedestal

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327, 1995.

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