Top 180 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

103. “The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

104. “Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

105. “Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

106. “The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

107. “I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

108. “Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

109. “The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

110. “Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

111. “The world is full of signals that we don’t perceive.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

112. “I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

113. “Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

114. “As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

115. “You put three facts together – that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there’s variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited – and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

116. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

117. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

118. “People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions – words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

119. “Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

120. “The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

121. “Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

122. “Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

123. “Common sense is a very poor guide to scientific insight for it represents cultural prejudice more often than it reflects the native honesty of a small boy before the naked emperor.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

124. “Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

125. “Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

126. “Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn’t science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

127. “We are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

128. “Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as ‘the intelligent layperson’ does exist – in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

129. “I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

130. “I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he’ll never type or play the piano.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

131. “We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

132. “I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

133. “With copious evidence ranging from Plato’s haughtiness to Beethoven’s tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

134. “People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among the details, not in the realm of pure generality. We must tackle and grasp the larger, encompassing themes of our universe, but we make our best approach through small curiosities that rivet our attention – all those pretty pebbles on the shoreline of knowledge. For the ocean of truth washes over the pebbles with every wave, and they rattle and clink with the most wondrous din.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

135. “Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

136. “The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

137. “History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

138. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

139. “The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

140. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

141. “We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

142. “Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity – the most precious trait of any adequate analysis – is erased.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

143. “Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these ‘higher’ advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection’s causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

144. “Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

145. “Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

146. “The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

147. “What’s important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

148. “History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

149. “Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

150. “In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.”

— Stephen Jay Gould