Quote

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

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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
Courses
Direction
Darwinism
Course
Claims
Evolutionary
Lying
Fit
Variation
Natural
Material
Supplies
Change
Evolution
Random
Materials
Selection
Essence
Claim
Ubiquitous
Lies
Creates
Directs

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Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
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A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted he must also be right.
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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.
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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.
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Pictures are not incidental frills to a text they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
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Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
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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.
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Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
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No one-liner can ever be optimal.
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I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
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Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.
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Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
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.
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In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.
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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.
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The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.
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