Darwin Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

““In Darwins post-platonische werelds is de variatie de fundamentele werkelijkheid en veranderen berekende gemiddelden in abstracties. We blijven echter de voorkeur geven aan het oudere en tegengestelde standpunt: we zien variatie nog steeds als een massa onlogische toevalligheden, die hoofdzakelijk van waarde is omdat zo'n spreiding te gebruiken is voor de berekening van een gemiddelde, hetgeen we dan beschouwen als iets wat een essentie nog het best benadert.””

Stephen Jay Gould

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.0 out of 5 (6 ratings)

Darwin Plato

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

Image

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

Stephen Jay Gould

Image

In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart…

Stephen Jay Gould

... 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

Image

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

Stephen Jay Gould

Image

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

Image

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

Stephen Jay Gould

Image

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

Image

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

Image

When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point…

Stephen Jay Gould

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

Image

I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with…

Stephen Jay Gould

Explore all 341 Stephen Jay Gould quotes

More Darwin quotes

One of my earliest memories is being backstage at 'Bran Nue Dae' in Darwin when I was about eight. It's such a fun, happy…

Shari Sebbens

Image

One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could…

Isabella Rossellini

Image

“[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned. It is a vacuous answer... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand…

P.W. Atkins

“The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins . And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism . But Dawkins ' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non- Darwinian .”

Ernst Mayr

“In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is…

Thomas Henry Huxley

“Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibnitz with their wondrous mathematical…

Frederick William Sanderson

Image

“Socrates could enjoy a banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting with a few friends by the way. Kant is said never to have been more than ten miles…

Bertrand Russell

“Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both…

Arno J. Mayer

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

Trofim Lysenko

Image

“There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity's original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three. We know the origins of the universe, the physics of the big bang and how the basic chemical elements…

J. Anderson Thomson Jr

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by…

Christopher Hitchens

“In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as…

Jerry A. Coyne

Browse all 132 Darwin quotes

Darwin Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Related quotes

More by Stephen Jay Gould

More Darwin quotes