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No one-liner can ever be optimal.
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
Optimal
Statistics
Ever
Liner
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
Most books, after all, are ephemeral their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
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
Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.
Stephen Jay Gould
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.
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
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
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.
Stephen Jay Gould
If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
Stephen Jay Gould
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
Stephen Jay Gould
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
Stephen Jay Gould
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
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
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Stephen Jay Gould
As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.
Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Stephen Jay Gould
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