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
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
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".
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.