Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gouldwas an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996 Gould was also hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, where he divided his time teaching there and at...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth10 September 1941
CountryUnited States of America
Stephen Jay Gould quotes about
Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.
Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.
If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human accomplishment, may we not all pledge to avoid the silly censoring that can lead to a codification of Orwell's Newspeak? Consider John Milton's reasons for why good arguments are often lost: 'For want of words, no doubt, or lack of breath!'
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -or any honest intellectual inquiry.
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...
Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
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.
We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears. co-author with Niles Eldridge
The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation.