Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

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.

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.

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.

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

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." But mistake it not.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.

We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.

We pass through this world but once.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

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

The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.

If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.

Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.

The median isn't the message.

Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization.

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.