Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
Stephen Jay Gould
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Correct
Reasons
Wrong
May
Reason
Believe
Things
People
Weirdest
More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.
Stephen Jay Gould
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
Stephen Jay Gould
I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
Stephen Jay Gould
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Stephen Jay Gould
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Stephen Jay Gould
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
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
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
No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call temperament.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Most books, after all, are ephemeral their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
Stephen Jay Gould
[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
Stephen Jay Gould
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
Stephen Jay Gould
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
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
Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).
Stephen Jay Gould
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
