Stephen Jay Gould QUOTES

1 " We pass through this world but once. 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. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , The Mismeasure of Man

2 " We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

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

― Stephen Jay Gould

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

― Stephen Jay Gould , Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

5 " Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

6 " No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas

7 " We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists "

― Stephen Jay Gould

8 " The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

9 " I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

10 " We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way. "

― Stephen Jay Gould

11 " Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History

12 " The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

13 " 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? "

― Stephen Jay Gould

14 " There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus. "

― Stephen Jay Gould

15 " Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , The Hedgehog, the Fox & the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science & the Humanities

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

― Stephen Jay Gould

17 " Current utility and historical origin are different subjects. "

― Stephen Jay Gould

18 " The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*? "

― Stephen Jay Gould , Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

19 " 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. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History

20 " 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. "

― Stephen Jay Gould , Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

1
2
3
4
5
6