Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Understanding

Quotes about: Understanding

• 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 why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage-good teaching-than a bill forcing our honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Teacher, Teaching, Science

• But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lying, Knowledge, Intelligent

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.149, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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

• We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Understanding, Principles

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.216, Harvard University Press

• Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. ( Aristotle , and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Kings, Views, Two

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

• Rifkin's assertions bear no relationship to what I have observed and practiced for 25 years ... Either I am blind or he is wrong - and I think I can show, by analyzing his slipshod scholarship and basic misunderstanding of science, that his world is an invention constructed to validate his own private hopes ... Rifkin shows no understanding of the norms and procedures of science: he displays little comprehension of what science is and how scientists work.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Years, Understanding

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