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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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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
Components
Engineers
Ideal
Limited
Ideals
Orchids
Available
Rigged
Evolution
Engineer
Made
Jury
More quotes by 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
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
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Stephen Jay Gould
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Stephen Jay Gould
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
Stephen Jay Gould
With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
Stephen Jay Gould
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Stephen Jay Gould
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
Stephen Jay Gould
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.
Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Stephen Jay Gould
Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.
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
... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
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
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
Stephen Jay Gould
