Stephen Jay Gould

"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."

61 likes

Source: Bully for Brontosaurus. Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Prologue, pp. 16 - 17, 1991.

About the author

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.

All quotes by Stephen Jay Gould →

Same author

More quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

See all →
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

Read quote
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist

"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."

Read quote
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist

"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."

Read quote
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist

"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."

Read quote
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist, Evolutionary Biologist

"Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind."

Read quote