Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

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.

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.

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.

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.

The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

... no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.

I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

God was there when it happened. We were not there.... Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this information is in His written Word.

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.

A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.

I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.

Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.

Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.

Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.

I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.