Biology Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change,…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of…

— Greg Graffin

The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual…

— Stephen Jay Gould

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution i.e., a species becoming a new species accomplishing a major morphological…

— Steven M. Stanley

At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The inevitability of gradualness.

— Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield

Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual…

— Ernst Mayr

“Life evolved from time”

— Sunday Adelaja

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The primitive history of the species is all the more fully retained in its germ-history in proportion as the series of embryonic forms traversed…

— Fritz Muller

Life's Solution builds a forceful case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes, not in terms of genetic details but rather their broad phenotypic manifestations.…

— Simon Conway Morris