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But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.

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
Human
Issues
Laugh
Distorted
Humans
Understanding
Intelligent
Perceptions
Years
Knowledge
Capacity
Invested
Never
Lying
Lies
Altered
World
Understand
Intellectual
Thousands
People
Energy
Failure
Foolish
Tell
Laughing
Intense
Seems
Seem
Perception
Derision

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
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I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
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Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
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We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
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We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
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Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
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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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The median isn't the message.
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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.
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Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
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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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.
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No one-liner can ever be optimal.
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People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
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Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
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No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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