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In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould
Age: 60 †
Born: 1941
Born: September 10
Died: 2002
Died: May 20
Evolutionary Biologist
Historian
Paleontologist
Pathologist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Voice Actor
Writer
Queens
New York
Positive
Asymmetry
Call
Incident
Evil
Incidents
Often
Spectacular
Great
Balanced
Every
Acts
Like
Invisible
Kindness
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
Stephen Jay Gould
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Stephen Jay Gould
The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Stephen Jay Gould
We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
Stephen Jay Gould
... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Stephen Jay Gould
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould
Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant S.O.B. like me, what comes naturally, you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done.
Stephen Jay Gould
People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
Facts do not 'speak for themselves' they are read in the light of theory.
Stephen Jay Gould
Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.
Stephen Jay Gould
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of lower animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
Stephen Jay Gould
Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
Stephen Jay Gould
