Quote

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

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
Place
Asking
Tension
Live
Failure
Systems
Must
Dangerous
Attempt
Questing
Make
Answers
Complexes
Ambiguous
Either
Complex
Exclusively
Stop
Unity
Uniqueness
Sense
Essential
Focusing
Nature
Essentials
Doomed

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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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.
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Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.
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What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
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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.
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Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
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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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Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
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People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.
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Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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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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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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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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 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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Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).
Stephen Jay Gould
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Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
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We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
Stephen Jay Gould
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All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.
Stephen Jay Gould