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The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.
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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Resides
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Universal
Attributes
Science
Enterprise
Cannot
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Disproven
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Fallibility
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
Stephen Jay Gould
... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
Stephen Jay Gould
We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.
Stephen Jay Gould
Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.
Stephen Jay Gould
Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
Stephen Jay Gould
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
Stephen Jay Gould
The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.
Stephen Jay Gould
But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
Stephen Jay Gould
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
Stephen Jay Gould
World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
Stephen Jay Gould
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
Stephen Jay Gould
Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.
Stephen Jay Gould
We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.
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
Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.
Stephen Jay Gould
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Stephen Jay Gould
