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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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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
Thinking
Future
Entered
World
Living
Cell
Science
Cooperation
Another
Cells
Firsts
Surely
First
Merely
Trying
Benefits
Darwinian
Make
Tough
Integration

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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.
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... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.
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No one-liner can ever be optimal.
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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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Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
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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.
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Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
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No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.
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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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Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.
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I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
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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.
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We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of easy listening.
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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.
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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.
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Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.
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Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
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Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
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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.
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The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: They still call it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore.
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