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What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.
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
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People
Reading
Knowledge
Learn
Human
Humans
Literacy
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More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
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
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.
Stephen Jay Gould
The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Stephen Jay Gould
Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.
Stephen Jay Gould
Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.
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
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
Stephen Jay Gould
Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.
Stephen Jay Gould
We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.
Stephen Jay Gould
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
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
I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.
Stephen Jay Gould
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
Details are all that matters God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
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
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
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
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
