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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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 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
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
![“No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that…” 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)
