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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
Humans
Important
Literacy
Made
Available
People
Intelligent
Reading
Knowledge
Learn
Human
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
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
Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
Stephen Jay Gould
Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
Stephen Jay Gould
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
Stephen Jay Gould
The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
Stephen Jay Gould
So much of science proceeds by telling stories.
Stephen Jay Gould
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
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
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
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
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
Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
Stephen Jay Gould
I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
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
Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Stephen Jay Gould
