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As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.

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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Identify
Many
Cities
Good
Word
Debased
People
Political
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Anything
Interference
Human
Ecology
Humans
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More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
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Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
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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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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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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
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People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
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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Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
Stephen Jay Gould
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
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Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.
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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Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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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Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Stephen Jay Gould