Top 180 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

153. “In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each...”

— Stephen Jay Gould

154. “Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

155. “I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

156. “Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

157. “Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

158. “Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

159. “No one-liner can ever be optimal.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

160. “It is the things we think we know – because they are so elementary or because they surround us – that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

161. “The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

162. “Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

163. “Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

164. “If Ediacara survivors had been able to evolve internal complexity later on, then the pathways from this radically different starting point would have produced a world worthy of science fiction at its best.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

165. “I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

166. “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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

167. “Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

168. “A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

169. “I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

170. “What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection – when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection’s centrality.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

171. “Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

172. “At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

173. “Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

174. “Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

175. “Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

176. “If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

177. “Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

178. “Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!”

— Stephen Jay Gould

179. “The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: “They still call it Kansas, but I don’t think we’re in the real world anymore.””

— Stephen Jay Gould

180. “Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.”

— Stephen Jay Gould