Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. — 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
We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -… — 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
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since… — 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
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
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
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 Copy Share Image
Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these 'higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 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
Siphonophores do not convey the message a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
It's true that the level of scientific knowledge among adults is very low, but that's not because there isn't a natural interest.… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind… — 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
“There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms --… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 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… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a… — 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
“We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and… — 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
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
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
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
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
