Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

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.
Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
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.
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.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
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.
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
We pass through this world but once.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
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.
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.
Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.
Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
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AuthorName
Stephen Jay Gould
Profession
Scientist
BirthDate
10 September, 1941
DeathDate
20 May, 2002
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