Stephen Jay Gould

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

— Stephen Jay Gould

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

— Stephen Jay Gould

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Is uniformitarianism necessary?

— Stephen Jay Gould

The median is not the message,

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Genius has as many components as the mind itself.”

— stephen jay gould

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be…

— Stephen Jay Gould

'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it:…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history,…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I am not [...] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

“I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility.…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working…

— Stephen Jay Gould

I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never…

— Stephen Jay Gould