Stephen Jay Gould Quotes - Page 12

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• Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Air, Apples, Outcomes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Labels, Groups, Enterprise

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.91, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Silly, Law

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• 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

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• Evolution is an obstacle course not a freeway; the correct analogue for long-term success is a distant punt receiver evading legions of would-be tacklers in an oddly zigzagged path toward a goal, not a horse thundering down the flat.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Horse, Goal, Long

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

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• Since the universe must contain millions of appropriate planets, consciousness in some form - but not with the paired eyes and limbs, and the brain built of neurons in the only example we know - may evolve frequently. But if only one origin of life in a million ever leads to consciousness, then Martian bacteria most emphatically do not imply Little Green Men.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Eye, Men, Origin Of Life

  Stephen Jay Gould (1999). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Three Rivers Press (CA)

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• Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Long, Vision, Drs

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.57, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Axes, Space, People

  "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 8, 1987.

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• It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Writing, Issues, Ethical Questions

  "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Unenchanted Evening", p. 39, 1993.

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• No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Reality, Ignorant, Mind

  "I Have Landed". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48, May 14, 2002.

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• As a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. Today my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift - a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Today, Students, Graduates

  "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "The Validation of Continental Drift", pp. 160-161, 1977.

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• There is no gene "for" such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. [...] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Environmental, Body, Action

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.91, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Believe, Book, Sleep

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Preface, p. 16, 1989.

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• The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Powerful, Airplane, Men

  "I Have Landed". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 390: "The Good People of Halifax", 2002.

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• [T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Style, Ordinary

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• We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Moon, Views, Ties

  "Eight Little Piggies". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "A Foot Soldier for Evolution", p. 441, 1993.

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• Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [...] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Struggle, Reality, Worry

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

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• Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Simple, Diversity

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.322, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Believe, Home, Mean

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.270, Harvard University Press

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• I am not [...] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. [...] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Kindness, Lying, Usual

  "Eight Little Piggies". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282, 1993.

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• The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental" production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Different, Culture, Environment

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

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• [E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Animal, Discipline

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  War, Book, Years

  "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Preface, p. 10, 1987.

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• Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Guessing, Merit, Doe

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

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• Siphonophores do not convey the message a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected and interacting in some higher, ineffable harmony. Nature revels in boundaries and distinctions; we inhabit a universe of structure. But since our universe of structure has evolved historically, it must present us with fuzzy boundaries, where one kind of thing grades into another.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Messages, Fuzzy, Kind

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.95, W. W. Norton & Company

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