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
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
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.
I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
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.
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".
The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.
If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration (falsely assuming that the tale possesses a weight of history and a sanction of evidence), then we are in for trouble - as critics properly nail the particular weakness, and then assume that the whole theory must be in danger if supporters choose such a fatuous case as a primary illustration.
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.
No one-liner can ever be optimal.