Best Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
- Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent. All
- Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree. Branch
- The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without. Always Worse
- So much of science proceeds by telling stories. Inspirational
- The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning. Cannot Resolve
- But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply… Any
- I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we… Conservation
- As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue.… Acknowledge
- I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions… Alternative
- The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction… All
- All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an… All
- God was there when it happened. We were not there.... Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and… Completely
- Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Abundant
- Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the… Anything Like
- The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err… Analysis
- Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not… Activity
- Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails… Among
- All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence. All
- Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics. Free
- No one-liner can ever be optimal. Inspirational
- Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we… Accidents
- We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. Animal
- Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make… Another Cell
- Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning. Any
- Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical… All
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