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Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Paleontologist

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Famous Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

“Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.”

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Book:The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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“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 gradualist accounts of evolution.”

Has BeensProblemImaginationCasesStageDesignEvolutionMajorsEvidenceAccountsAbsenceTransitionConstructsInabilityFossilsPersistentCreationismNaggingPaleontology
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.”

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Book:The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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“Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles.”

PeopleDoeEndsScienceResultsPrinciplesIssuesSuccessfulEvolutionEuropeDiedPopulationTendenciesFragileEntityCousinItemsAsianPredictableAncestryEmbodimentImprobablePrecariousEnd ResultsCollateralNeanderthals
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.”

ThinkingWorldWaySelfProblemIndividualSocialScientistMethodMythologyObjectivesRationalLogicalServingStereotypeRobotsBiasedScientific MethodPreconceptionsSelf Serving
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.”

IfsHumansLittlesShowsValuesEffortMoralCreaturesStandardsGladPreservesDullImpressedConservationWormsOrnamentsMoral ValuesToadsPandasSolicitude
Book:An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas
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“I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.”

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Book:Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
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“All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.”

HappensNaturalInterestingIssuesExampleTheoryExpectationsThings HappenPhenomenonRelativeAgain And AgainFrequencyRichnessNatural History
Book:Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
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“Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.”

FormOrderCausesNaturalTheoryBasesFundamentalsSpeciesChaosAlbumsDullDedicatedOrganismsExploringStampsSimilarityClassificationCataloguesFilingNatural OrderUndervaluedFoldersTaxonomy
Book:Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
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