Stephen Jay Gould

In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events…

— Stephen Jay Gould

We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and…

— 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…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way,…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they…

— Stephen Jay Gould

The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and…

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny…

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions…

— Stephen Jay Gould

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place…

— Stephen Jay Gould