Stephen Jay Gould - Science Quotes

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If texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only for aesthetic or commercial value. Primates are visual animals, and (particularly in science) illustration has a language and set of conventions all its own.

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
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 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.

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
In these days when Molecular Biology is beginning to be seen as a restricted science, narrowing our vision by concentrating on the basic uniformity of organisms at the macromolecular level, the need for taxonomists to draw attention to the enormous diversity and variation of this earth's biota becomes more and more pressing.

Stephen Jay Gould
Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

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
Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote: Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Stephen Jay Gould
In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent'

Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

Stephen Jay Gould
Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.

Stephen Jay Gould
Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.

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
I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

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
I believe […] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. […] I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and—if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills—on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

Stephen Jay Gould
Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

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
The story of a theory's failure often strikes readers as sad and unsatisfying. Since science thrives on self-correction, we who practice this most challenging of human arts do not share such a feeling. We may be unhappy if a favored hypothesis loses or chagrined if theories that we proposed prove inadequate. But refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment, even when […] no new and comprehensive theory has yet filled the void.

Stephen Jay Gould
The pleasure of discovery in science derives not only from the satisfaction of new explanations but also, if not more so, from fresh (and often more difficult) puzzles that the novel solutions generate.

Stephen Jay Gould
In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each...

Stephen Jay Gould
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.

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
In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science—empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

Stephen Jay Gould
And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.

Stephen Jay Gould
Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by "knowing" the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science—or of any honest intellectual inquiry.

Stephen Jay Gould
The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.

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
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 human intellectual tradition.

Stephen Jay Gould