Famous quotes by »

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard University. He was a pioneering researcher, a great writer and defender of scientific education. He died in May 2002

Update this biography »
Complete biography of Stephen Jay Gould »

1 fan

Sort by:PopularityA - Z

... many folks take them seriously because they just ‘know’ that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

... objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny...

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

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.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

The Fox devises many strategies, the Hedgehog knows one great and effective strategy.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

[L]ife shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense—only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

“I emphatically do not assert the general ‘truth’ of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

“If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range ...

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

“Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes—to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale—a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

“The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

“The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.

– Stephen Jay Gould

Rate it:

Share your thoughts on Stephen Jay Gould's quotes with the community:

0 Comments

Notify me of new comments via email.

Quote of the Day Today's Quote | Archive

Would you like us to send you a FREE inspiring quote delivered to your inbox daily?

Citation

Use the citation below to add this author page to your bibliography:

Style:MLAChicagoAPA

"Stephen Jay Gould Quotes." Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 25 Dec. 2024. <https://www.quotes.net/authors/Stephen+Jay+Gould+Quotes>.

Missing a quote of Stephen Jay Gould?

Know another good quote of Stephen Jay Gould? Don't keep it to yourself!

The Web's Largest Resource for

Famous Quotes & Sayings

A Member Of The STANDS4 Network

Our favorite collection of

Famous Authors

Sigmund Freud
1856 - 1939
Charles Dickens
1812 - 1870
Golda Meir
1898 - 1978
Edgar Allan Poe
1809 - 1849
Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929 - 1968
Marilyn Monroe
1926 - 1962
Mother Teresa
1910 - 1997

Browse Quotes.net

#A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Random New Quotes

Quiz

Are you a quotes master?

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself"

A Elizabeth Taylor

B Amelia Earhart

C Christopher Columbus

D Bear Grylls