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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.

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
Activity
Lower
Recapitulation
Normal
Adult
Persuasive
Focus
Racism
Races
Race
Scientist
Convenient
White
Adults
Provided
Children
Evolution
Activities
Looked
Comparison
Behavior
Scientists

More quotes by 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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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
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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.
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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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Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Facts do not 'speak for themselves' they are read in the light of theory.
Stephen Jay Gould
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If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
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The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
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... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
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The median isn't the message.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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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Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade — a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
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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The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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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The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould