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The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.
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
Fierce
Inaccessible
Putrefaction
Beast
Beasts
Fieldwork
Deep
Flies
Jungles
Important
Jungle
Locate
Restless
Natives
Legends
Inhabited
Site
Swarms
Surrounded
Sites
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.
Stephen Jay Gould
Science is not 'organized common sense' at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.
Stephen Jay Gould
I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
Stephen Jay Gould
In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.
Stephen Jay Gould
The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.
Stephen Jay Gould
Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance.
Stephen Jay Gould
World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
Stephen Jay Gould
A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted he must also be right.
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
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
Pictures are not incidental frills to a text they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.
Stephen Jay Gould
... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
Stephen Jay Gould
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
Stephen Jay Gould
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
Stephen Jay Gould
The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.
Stephen Jay Gould
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.
Stephen Jay Gould
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.
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