Top 180 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

53. “Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

54. “World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

55. “Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

56. “In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

57. “I emphatically do not assert the general ‘truth’ of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

58. “Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

59. “Any decent writer writes because there’s some deep internal need to keep learning.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

60. “Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

61. “Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

62. “Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

63. “A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

64. “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

65. “Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

66. “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

67. “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

68. “We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

69. “The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

70. “The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

71. “We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

72. “If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

73. “We who revel in nature’s diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

74. “The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

75. “I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

76. “Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

77. “Evolution is an obstacle course not a freeway; the correct analogue for long-term success is a distant punt receiver evading legions of would-be tacklers in an oddly zigzagged path toward a goal, not a horse thundering down the flat.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

78. “Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

79. “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

80. “Even the standard example of ancient nonsense – the debate about angels on pinheads – makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

81. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

82. “Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life’s pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

83. “Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

84. “All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

85. “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

86. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

87. “Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn’t fascination as comforting as solace? Isn’t nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn’t curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

88. “Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

89. “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

90. “Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

91. “The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

92. “No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

93. “Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

94. “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

95. “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

96. “All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again – finally turning into an expectation – then theories are overturned.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

97. “I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

98. “But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

99. “I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam – I break in order to reveal.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

100. “Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.”

— Stephen Jay Gould