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
Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.
[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
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.
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...
The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.