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The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

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
Events
Meanness
Existence
Nasty
History
Grants
Nature
Cruel
Power
Rare
Human
Shape
Humans
Tragedy
Asymmetry
Real
Shapes
Structural

More quotes by 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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World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
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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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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Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of lower animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Stephen Jay Gould
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Science is not 'organized common sense' at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.
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
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
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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... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.
Stephen Jay Gould
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In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each.
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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Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
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The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould