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

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The enemy is not fundamentalism it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the liberal rhetoric of equal time. But mistake it not.
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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
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Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
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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.
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... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
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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.
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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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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.
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People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
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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
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Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
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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.
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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.
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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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Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss.
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A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted he must also be right.
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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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The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.
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