Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Tradition

Quotes about: Tradition

• 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.

• The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Thinking, Fog

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.57, Harvard University Press

• Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Hope, Science, Comforting

  Stephen Jay Gould (1987). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.401, W. W. Norton & Company

• I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Baseball, Commitment, Views

• Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Self, Vision, Bricks

  "An Urchin in the Storm". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Cardboard Darwinism", p. 27, 1987.

• The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Discovery, Missing, Usual

• Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Latin, Book, Italian

  Interview With Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

• The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Plato, Philosophy, Philosophical

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.177, W. W. Norton & Company

• When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Disappointment, Writing, Loss

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, p.437, W. W. Norton & Company

• The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Animal, Doubt, Machines

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