W. M. L. Jay Quotes

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.

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.