“History is also a hard taskmaster, for she covers her paths by erasing so much evidence from her records—” — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools,… — 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
With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human… — 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
The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion… — 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
Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 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.… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents… — 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
We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as… — 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
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. — 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
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
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
The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature.… — 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
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration (falsely assuming that the tale possesses a weight of… — 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
![“The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d9d/stephen-jay-gould-885_causes_the-causes-of-life-s-history-cannot-reso_2283633.jpg)
![“[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/aee/stephen-jay-gould-885_age_in-natural-history-great-discovery-often_987347.jpg)
![“I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and…” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/55c/stephen-jay-gould-885_emmanuel_i-am-particularly-fond-of-emmanuel-mende_1467994.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/quotes/img-quotes/eac/stephen-jay-gould-885_collecting_mary-anning-is-probably-the-most-importa_786033.jpg)
