At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these 'higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
... For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it:… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Evolution is an obstacle course not a freeway; the correct analogue for long-term success is a distant punt receiver evading legions of… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The myriad valleys could have arisen anywhere on the landscape. The current positions are quite accidental. If we could repeat the experiment,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it:… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading church men of all persuasions, for they… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ... — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower"… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
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… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably)… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share
![“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is…” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/523/stephen-jay-gould-885_accepting_throughout-his-last-half-dozen-books-for_1536434.jpg)
![“Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/eac/stephen-jay-gould-885_collecting_mary-anning-is-probably-the-most-importa_786033.png)
