Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.” — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences. — 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
Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where… — 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
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 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
The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the… — 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
All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that… — 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 Image
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Image
... 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 Image
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ... — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Image
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
