“Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology. — 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
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us.… — 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
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
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 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
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
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