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Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.

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
Integrity
Intellectual
Cost
Eternal
Vigilance
Freedom
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Basis
Bases
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More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.
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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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.
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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Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
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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Pictures are not incidental frills to a text they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.
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
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World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
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 only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.
Stephen Jay Gould