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
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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
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 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
If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex… — 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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It… — 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
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
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
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
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology. — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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