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I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
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
Book
Reviewers
Long
Passings
Satan
Several
Passing
Brutus
Picture
Lodged
Books
Jaws
Future
Judas
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
Stephen Jay Gould
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
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
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
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.
Stephen Jay Gould
Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Stephen Jay Gould
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.
Stephen Jay Gould
Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Stephen Jay Gould
[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
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.
Stephen Jay Gould
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
Stephen Jay Gould
