Quote

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

Stephen Jay Gould

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Distant
Caught
Extinctions
Species
Throes
Mass
Decidedly
Power
Futures
May
Threaten
Unpleasant
Extinction

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

Image
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade — a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
The median isn't the message.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
[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.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
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
Image
The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.
Stephen Jay Gould
Image
It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.
Stephen Jay Gould