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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

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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
Desire
Primaries
Shunning
Believe
Primary
Foibles
Tendencies
Propensity
Logic
Frail
Humanity
Embracing
Rather
Recognise
Religion
Observe
Hope
Tendency

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The enemy is not fundamentalism it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the liberal rhetoric of equal time. But mistake it not.
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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.
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Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss.
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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
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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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We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of easy listening.
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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.
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The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.
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Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
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I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
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 proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
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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If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
Stephen Jay Gould
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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
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The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
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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.
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Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
Stephen Jay Gould