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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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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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Answers
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Science
Darwinian
Mean
Insofar
Made
Essence
Life
Answer
Revolution

More quotes by 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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The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.
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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
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My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.
Stephen Jay Gould
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We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
Stephen Jay Gould
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I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
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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Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.
Stephen Jay Gould
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So much of science proceeds by telling stories.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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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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.
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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Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
Stephen Jay Gould