The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria. — 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
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 Copy Share Image
Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Science can't tell us what our life means ethically. It can't tell us what we are meant to do as moral creatures.… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will… — 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
Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway… — 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
Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement--and not… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than… — 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
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
No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the… — 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
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
If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the… — 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
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
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive… — 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
Unfortunately, all life on earth - the only life we know - represents, for all its current variety, the results of a… — 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)
![“Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we…” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/345/stephen-jay-gould-885_accounts_paleontologists-fossil-experts-have-paid_1303150.jpg)
![“Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life…” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/44c/stephen-jay-gould-885_chosen_can-i-pay-any-higher-tribute-to-a-man-ge_2067310.jpg)
![“No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly…” quote by Stephen Jay Gould](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/a15/stephen-jay-gould-885_common_no-more-harmful-nonsense-exists-than-the_2399638.jpg)
