Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: "They still call it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore."

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.

Is uniformitarianism necessary?

It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.

We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.

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

Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well?

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.

Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run.

Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.

If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done what I have.