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Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Paleontologist

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Famous Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

FormSecretRecordsTreeEvolutionEvidenceTradeExtremesDataBranchesReasonablePersistFossilsTextbooksInferenceRarityPaleontologyCreation ScienceCreation And Evolution
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).”

IfsRealityEconomyAdvantageBurdenEnormousFormerEvolveLatinOrganismsFossilsPaymentCattleBonus
Book:The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
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“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

IfsCertainUniverseAsksViewsCommonConditionsExpressionMaterialsUltimateUniversalConstitutionIndependentFundamentalsStructurePropertyRaisedGradesPhenomenonFossilsVaryHomo SapiensRarityMartiansOddballs
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.”

NeedsYearsIdeasStoriesEarthReligionOrderThreeHalfAtheismEventsProductsThousandMajorsArgumentMiracleClaimsIncludingOpponentsAbandonCollapseBiblicalFloodThousand YearsFossilsRelianceLiteralAssertionGenesisDistortionInvokeOf ContextCitations
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears. co-author with Niles Eldridge”

IfsDoeExpectationsAreasTransformationSpeciesPopulationAriseLocalsEvolveAncestorIsolatedFossilsSequenceGreat ExpectationsChimera
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design or stupidity, I do not know-as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

KnowsFormReligionLevelsRecordsGroupsDesignMinesEvolutionSpeciesStupidityTrendsAgain And AgainLackingFossilsEquilibriumAdmittingMiningPaleontologyInfuriatingBiological Evolution
Book:Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further 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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“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.”

ProcessNaturalViewsStudyStudentsEvolutionArgumentAccountsPaidDataPreservesExpertsFancySelectionFossilsNatural SelectionStasis
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.”

ScienceArtistStuffImaginationAnimalLordFireGraceFiguresPaintingSkillsBonesDryThis DayValleysFossilsKnightsDinosaursSkeletonsReconstructionEzekielDry Bones
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“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.”

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Book:The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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