Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

329 Sourced Quotes

The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.

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

Stephen Jay Gould
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.

Stephen Jay Gould
History subverts the stereotype of science as a precise, heartless enterprise that strips the uniqueness from any complexity and reduces everything to timeless, repeatable, controlled experiments in a laboratory.

Stephen Jay Gould
People often reach correct answers for wrong or illogical reasons.

Stephen Jay Gould
Animals in nature, contrary to the suspicions of cynics or the hopes of idealists, are neither intrinsically vicious nor altruistic. Competition and cooperation are both nature's ways.

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

Stephen Jay Gould
People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

Stephen Jay Gould
One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

Stephen Jay Gould
In the bad old days, before men rose from their armchairs to look at rocks in the field, biblical limitations of the Mosaic chronology precluded any understanding of our earth's history.

Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity.

Stephen Jay Gould
Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

Stephen Jay Gould
Theoretical arguments may be dazzling, but give me a good old fact any time.

Stephen Jay Gould
Great thinkers are never passive before facts. They ask questions of nature; they do not follow her humbly. They have hopes and hunches, and they try hard to construct the world in their light. Hence, great thinkers also make great errors.

Stephen Jay Gould
Interesting fallacies are often subtle, often based upon hidden assumptions, unstated and probably unconsciously held.

Stephen Jay Gould
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.

Stephen Jay Gould
We learn from our errors, perhaps most of all from our shameful mistakes.

Stephen Jay Gould
I would say usually, theories act as straitjackets to channel observations toward their support, and to forestall data that might refute them. Such theories cannot be rejected from within, for we will not conceptualize the disapproving observations.

Stephen Jay Gould
Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.

Stephen Jay Gould
Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery.

Stephen Jay Gould
If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time — no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence for human evolution.... surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar's life.)

Stephen Jay Gould
We will be a bit freerer, a bit more enlightened, a bit readier to work for planetary preservation with the rest of kindred life, when we truly know why each and every last one of us is a monkey's uncle.

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

Stephen Jay Gould
[Darwin's notebooks] include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism — the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products.

Stephen Jay Gould
Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).

Stephen Jay Gould
Science is accessible to all thinking people because it applies universal tools of intellect to its distinctive material. The understanding of science — one need hardly repeat the litany — becomes ever more crucial in a world of biotechnology, computers, and bombs.

Stephen Jay Gould
No factual discovery of science (statements about how nature "is") can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we "ought" to behave) or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the "purpose" of our lives).

Stephen Jay Gould
What could be more democratic than the principle that nuggets of real discovery abound in primary sources, located in such accessible places as major university and city libraries, for those willing to do the work and develop the skills.

Stephen Jay Gould
Since all discovery emerges from an interaction of mind and nature, thoughtful scientists must scrutinize the main biases that record our socialization, our moment in political and geographical history, even the limitations (if we hope to comprehend them from within) imposed by a mental machinery jury-rigged in the immensity of evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould
Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life's history.

Stephen Jay Gould