Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

329 Sourced Quotes

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.

Stephen Jay Gould
Every item of natural history is both a joy to behold and an instrument of our potential enlightenment.

Stephen Jay Gould
My response to nearly all misquotation is the effective retort of preference: utter silence. (Honorable intellectual disagreement should always be addressed; misquotation should be ignored, when possible and politically practical).

Stephen Jay Gould
The test of any organizing principle is its success in rendering specifics, not its status as abstract generality.

Stephen Jay Gould
I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).

Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution is a quirky take of old structures pressed and altered to new functions.

Stephen Jay Gould
Objectivity is not an unobtainable emptying of mind, but a willingness to abandon a set of preferences — for or against some view, as Darwin said — when the world seems to work in a contrary way.

Stephen Jay Gould
Surely, the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world.

Stephen Jay Gould
If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy — Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Stephen Jay Gould
Parochial taxonomies are a curse of intellectual life.

Stephen Jay Gould
Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

Stephen Jay Gould
Questions are not neutral; they presuppose a list of assumptions that may be long and complex.

Stephen Jay Gould
I regard the failure to find a clear "vector of progress" in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. But I also believe we are now on the verge of a solution, thanks to a better understanding of evolution in both normal and catastrophic times.

Stephen Jay Gould
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.

Stephen Jay Gould
We see, in the vastness of geologic time, events that bear superficial similarity to phenomena of local populations — and we assign a similar cause [to these events] without realizing that the extended time itself precludes such an application.

Stephen Jay Gould
Creative science is always a mixture of facts and ideas. Great thinkers are not those who can free their minds from cultural baggage and think or observe objectively (for such a thing is impossible), but people who use their milieu creatively rather than as a constraint.

Stephen Jay Gould
All great theories are expansive, and all notions so rich in scope and implication are underpinned by visions about the nature of things. You may call these visions "philosophy," or "metaphor," or "organizing principle," but one thing they are surely not — they are not simple inductions from observed facts of the natural world.

Stephen Jay Gould
Duality may be a conceptual prison, but if we must live with such a mental strategy, we might maximize our opportunity to grasp some of nature's complexity by hitching our star to the dyad of change and constancy. Slow and steady does not always win the race.

Stephen Jay Gould
Facts do not "speak for themselves"; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robotlike accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation.

Stephen Jay Gould
Sediments between 4 and 10 million years in age are potential guardians of the Holy Grail of human evolution — the period when our lineage began its separate end run to later domination, and a time for which no fossil evidence exists at all.

Stephen Jay Gould
I do not know that my view is more correct; I do not even think that "right" and "wrong" are good categories for assessing complex mental models of external reality — for models in science are judged [as] useful or detrimental, not as true or false.

Stephen Jay Gould
Perspectives that are reversed or orthogonal to traditional modes form my stock in trade. (I have long argued that conceptual locks are far more powerful than factual lacks as barriers to scientific understanding.)

Stephen Jay Gould
In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould
The net of science covers the empirical universe: What is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). Non Overlapping Magisteria

Stephen Jay Gould
Among people I have met, the few whom I would term great all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day of their lives.

Stephen Jay Gould
The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.

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

Stephen Jay Gould
We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.

Stephen Jay Gould
Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature. Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.

Stephen Jay Gould