History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. — 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
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the "liberal" rhetoric… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of… — 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
Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of… — 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
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
History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities. — 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
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
Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.” — 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
It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity.… — 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
... For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.” — 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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