People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different… — 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
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 Copy Share Image
As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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.… — 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
Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I think there have to be Bachs and Beethovens. We may have - there are so many more people. Musical training is… — 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
