Quote

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

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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
Make
Bodies
Time
Seeking
Merely
Evolution
Places
Dawkins
Battle
Aggregate
Among
Genes
Body
Copies

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.
Stephen Jay Gould
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But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
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People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
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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I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
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It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.
Stephen Jay Gould
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We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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All science is intelligent inference excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.
Stephen Jay Gould
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All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
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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The median isn't the message.
Stephen Jay Gould