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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.

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
Space
Easily
Previously
Natural
Machines
Gathered
History
Discovery
Maps
Often
Tools
Conventional
Great
Mines
Worlds
Penetrating
World
Mine
Hidden
Shiny
Filled
Machine
Inaccessible
Age
Requires
Gems

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The median isn't the message.
Stephen Jay Gould
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But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.
Stephen Jay Gould
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If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range.
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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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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No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call temperament.
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
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Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession.
Stephen Jay Gould
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With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Facts do not 'speak for themselves' they are read in the light of theory.
Stephen Jay Gould
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No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
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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Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.
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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Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.
Stephen Jay Gould
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If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Stephen Jay Gould