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Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

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Famous Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

“Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.”

PeopleThinkingWorldBeliefForceLosesViewsAcceptingColorJudgmentIdealsFundamentalsComparisonCriteriaRetardedShort People
Book:The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History
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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.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsWayWellsEnoughMagicStageParticularOrdinaryScientistTricksObjectivesMortalsPerformersArrogantPsychicsFooledScrutinyPhony
Book:The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)
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“If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated and must not be condemned by genetic speculation.”

PeopleIfsNeedsHumansLife IsLibertyPositionBehaviorAdultsPhilosophicalSticksWorthyArguingSpeculationPrivate LifeUnnaturalCondemnationVindicated
Book:Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
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“I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of debates by seeking other dichotomies more appropriate than, or simply different from, the conventional divisions. All dichotomies are simplifications, but the rendition of a conflict along differing axes of several orthogonal dichotomies might provide an amplitude of proper intellectual space without forcing us to forgo our most comforting tool of thought.”

PeopleDifferentMightSpaceConflictDespairIntellectualToolsSeekingDebateFamiliarAppropriateDivisionConventionalComfortingTacticsFrameworkAxesSimplificationDichotomyPersuading
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.”

PeopleKnowsMenNeedsWritingTryingLostSportsEffortIssuesFansMoralityBaseballBallsSticksProfoundExcuseInnocenceParenthoodAdsHittingGentlenessNo ExcusesSuggestingGrown ManProfunditySillinessUnreachableLinkages
Book:Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
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“It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.”

PeopleNeedsWritingHumansWellsHardReasonChallengesMoralIssuesArgumentLet MeStupidityPracticalsEthicalUsualConventionalUnfairEcologyExtinctionFloatsBiologistUnconventionalSnailHumanisticInversePrimacyHuman StupidityEthical Questions
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“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.”

PeopleIfsBelieveStillsBookLanguageI BelieveSleepSpecialStudentsConceptsIntelligentProfitCompromiseGenreGraduatesBusinessmanPillsCountingRichnessAmbiguitySuitableDistortionStinkSimplificationTokyoGraduate StudentsSeminarsSleeping Pills
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day of their lives.”

PeopleLifeKindMomentsValuesTermWorkDoubtShareMetsActivityCapacityAvailableInsightImpulseUnexpectedInternalsDedicationFierceAngst
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

PeoplePeaceInterestInterestingBrainTalentFieldsEqualWeightDiedCertaintyBiologyCottonSmart PeopleScience PhysicsSweatshopsHidden TalentsCotton Fields
Book:The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
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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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“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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