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 7 of 16)

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

Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"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 to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless."

Smart Book School
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats."

Progress Climate Principles
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or any honest intellectual inquiry."

Lying Knowing Intellectual
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences."

Evolution Problem Environment
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism."

Yield Theory Of Evolution Doe
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process."

Science Evolution Process
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes."

Views Long Misunderstood
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people."

Thinking Psychics People
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner."

World Behave Refuse
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading church men of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program...The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the 'liberal' rhetoric of 'equal time'."

Horse Lying Men
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition."

Latin Book Italian
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated."

Reflection Population Records
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss."

Past Technology Differences
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence."

Yield Example Facts
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation."

Disappointment Writing Loss
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Current utility and historical origin are different subjects."

Historical Different Currents
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan."

Book Long Brutus
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts."

Horse Time People
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis."

Integrity Intellectual Add
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Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist
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"The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion"

Enemy
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