Humans Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

— Stephen Jay Gould

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

— Stephen Jay Gould

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

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

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

Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to…

— Stephen Jay Gould

But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I am not [...] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie…

— 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 is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently…

— 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

I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in…

— Stephen Jay Gould

If any issue should unite liberals and conservatives, anyone who cares about the integrity of human achievement or respect for human accomplishment,…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating, second,…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of…

— Stephen Jay Gould

If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions…

— Stephen Jay Gould