Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man (1981)

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Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled—while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.

Stephen Jay Gould
I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.

Stephen Jay Gould
Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be...We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

Stephen Jay Gould
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 invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

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