Stephen Jay Gould

"Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world"

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Source: Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.310, W. W. Norton & Company

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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.

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"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."

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"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

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"We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love."

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"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

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