Causes Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have…

— Karl Marx

“The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary…

— René Guénon

The very foundation of our science is only an inference; far the whole of it rests an the unprovable assumption that, all through the…

— William Morris Davis

Occurrences which according to received theories ought not to happen, are the facts which serve as clues to new discoveries

— John Herschel

“Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier…

— Alfred Wegener

Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have…

— Richard Dawkins

“[ When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996 :] If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion,…

— Carl Sagan

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted…

— Anonymous

Tedious as it may appear to some to dwell on the discovery of odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away by…

— Augustus Pitt Rivers

Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely.

— George Gaylord Simpson

All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when…

— Stephen Jay Gould

It reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypotheses. To refute…

— Galileo Galilei