Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould

Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist

Stephen Jay Gould was a prominent paleontologist and evolutionary biologist known for his theory of punctuated equilibrium and influential writings.

Science Evolution People Lying Thinking Views
Born
September 10, 1941
Quotes
308
Rank
#259

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Stephen Jay Gould quotes (page 5 of 16)

308 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"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 of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device."

Philosophy Silly Law
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation."

Events Stories History Of Life
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined."

Animal Doubt Machines
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again."

Progress Littles Tiny
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition."

Lying Views Perspective
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers."

Knowing Discipline Interesting
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe."

Believe Humanity Religion
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study."

Views Data Fancy
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible."

Positive Kindness Evil
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"[T]ruly grand and powerful theories [...] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [...] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly."

Brother Powerful Dad
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail."

Fascination Details Holiness
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way."

Atheist Offering Interesting
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization."

Intellectual Mind Used
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function."

Brain Survival Essentials
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either)."

Past Law Data
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"History employs evolution to structure biological events in time."

Time Science History
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant."

Clever People One Liner
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity)."

Clouds Glasses Views
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight."

Order Profound Insight
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