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If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

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
Irrationalism
Consistent
Enemy
Religion
Science

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
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We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
Stephen Jay Gould
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
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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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
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
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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All science is intelligent inference excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould
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An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.
Stephen Jay Gould
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In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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