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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.

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
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Stumbling
Design
Link
Single
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Progress
Apparently
Invertebrates
Greatest
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Vertebrates
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Encounters
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Designs

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
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Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
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Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
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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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Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
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I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
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All science is intelligent inference excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
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[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.
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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).
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.
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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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Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
Stephen Jay Gould
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[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
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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Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the experimental production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.
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Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould