I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is… — 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
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
I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
“My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open… — 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
