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In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each.

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
Two
Supposed
Genesis
Literalism
Evolution
Contradictory
Opportunistic
Advantage
Classroom
Aborted
Groups
Recently
Extracted
Question
Followed
Inject
Struggle
Usual
Classrooms
Sides
Arguing
Rhetorical
Science
Strategy
Fundamentalist

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.
Stephen Jay Gould
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As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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
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Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
Stephen Jay Gould
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No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call temperament.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
Stephen Jay Gould