Quote

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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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
Spirit
Imperfect
Reality
Escape
Hard
Philosophical
World
Measure
Underlying
Merely
Plato
Tradition
Representation
Philosophy
Superficial
Dies
Unable

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
Stephen Jay Gould
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The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The true beauty of nature is her amplitude she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould
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For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).
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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 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
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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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Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.
Stephen Jay Gould
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People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
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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So much of science proceeds by telling stories.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Pictures are not incidental frills to a text they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
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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Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
Stephen Jay Gould
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My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould