Years Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

14 Years quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

All Years quotes Stephen Jay Gould’s page

Stephen Jay Gould’s reflections on years blend evolutionary insight with philosophical musings. This selection of fourteen quotes offers a succinct taste of how a scientist contemplates the long arc of history.

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Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from…

Stephen Jay Gould

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Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the…

Stephen Jay Gould

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Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

Stephen Jay Gould

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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

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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

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We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures;…

Stephen Jay Gould

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If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will…

Stephen Jay Gould

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Rifkin's assertions bear no relationship to what I have observed and practiced for 25 years ... Either I am blind or he…

Stephen Jay Gould

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We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes ; and we can trace the products of…

Stephen Jay Gould

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South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before…

Stephen Jay Gould

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We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility;…

Stephen Jay Gould

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Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just…

Stephen Jay Gould

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It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in…

Stephen Jay Gould

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... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now.…

Stephen Jay Gould

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More by Stephen Jay Gould

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

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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

Stephen Jay Gould

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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

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... 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

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Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...

Stephen Jay Gould

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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

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The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

Stephen Jay Gould

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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