Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

158 quotes in 2411 categories

• What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.
• The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
• Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and…
• We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.
• In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and…
• Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even…
• Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that…
• Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.
• Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant…
• Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.
• Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos…
• Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
• Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained…
• [Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
• Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.
• The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
• The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates…
• I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.
• Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal…
• But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can…

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