Quotessence
Home / Books / The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

Book by Stephen Jay Gould · 3 quotes · Evolution, Ifs, World

Filter quotes by topic

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History 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.”

“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.”

“Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.”