Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gouldwas an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996 Gould was also hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, where he divided his time teaching there and at...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth10 September 1941
CountryUnited States of America
long doe enzymes
[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make "novelty seeking" or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.
unity essentials asking
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
simple animal views
Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.
life progress stories
The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.
life science men
Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession.
science evolution marcos
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
hope science comforting
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
angel numbers house
Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
plato philosophy philosophical
The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
night cities bombs
We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.
disappointment writing loss
When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.
data tree secret
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.
nature self true-beauty
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).
book men dedication
I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of sycophantic insincerity, praising him as the light of the universe (in hopes, no doubt, for a few ducats to support future work); this old practice makes me feel like such an honest and upright man, by comparison, when I put a positive spin, perhaps ever so slightly exaggerated, on a grant proposal.