Science Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.

— Stephen Jay Gould

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

— Stephen Jay Gould

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for…

— Stephen Jay Gould

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that…

— Stephen Jay Gould

How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written…

— Stephen Jay Gould

We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify…

— Stephen Jay Gould

In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw,…

— Stephen Jay Gould

[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Rifkin's assertions bear no relationship to what I have observed and practiced for 25 years ... Either I am blind or he…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople.…

— Stephen Jay Gould

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be…

— Stephen Jay Gould

It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity.…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement--and not…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke…

— Stephen Jay Gould

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.

— Stephen Jay Gould

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case.”

— Stephen Jay Gould