Quote

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

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
Phenomenology
Punctuation
Adequate
Explain
Fully
Remains
Ordinary
Causes
Speciation

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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.
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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.
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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.
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We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
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Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
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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.
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In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.
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The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: They still call it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore.
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