Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in… — 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
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of… — 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
Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in… — 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
