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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
Liner
Optimal
Statistics
Ever
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
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
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.
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
The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
Stephen Jay Gould
The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.
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
Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.
Stephen Jay Gould
In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.
Stephen Jay Gould
[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
Stephen Jay Gould
The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
Stephen Jay Gould
Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
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
... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
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
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
