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“The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in reconfiguring a host crab as a support system, all underscore the myopia of our conventional wisdom in regarding rhizocephalans as degenerate parasites because the adult anatomy of internal roots and external sac seem so simple.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 371
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life , Wisdom , Behavior , Support

“I love these tales because, in more reasonable attributions of motive, they so beautifully embody a fundamental theme of historical explanation - that consequences of substantial import often arise from triggers of entirely different intent. In other words, current utility bears no necessary relationship with historical origin.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 302
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Love , Motivation

“I can only look from the outside (or cut into the inside, but flesh and genes do not reveal organic totality). I am stuck with a panoply of ineluctably indirect methods - some very sophisticated to be sure. I can atomize, experiment, and infer. I can record reams of data about behaviors and responses. But if I could be a beetle or a bacillus for that one precious minute - and live to tell the tale in perfect memory - then I might truly fulfill Darwin's dictum penned into an early notebook containing the first full flowering of his evolutionary ideas during the late 1830's: "He who understands the baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 376
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Behavior , Flowers , Idea , Understanding

“Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most “modern” evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of “Neo-Darwinism.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 54
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Error , Literature , Failure , Study

“This essay treats the most celebrated story in the extreme simplification in an adult parasite - in the interests of illuminating, reconciling, and, perhaps, even resolving two major biases that have so hindered our understanding of natural history: the misequation of evolution with progress, and the undervaluing of an organism by considering only its adult form and not the entire life cycle.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 356
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life , History , Understanding , Nature

“Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 437–438
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

World , Beauty

“[In natural history, ] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"Of Embryos and Ancestors", p. 318
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age , World , History , Nature

“Thus, we have three principles for increasing adequacy of data: if you must work with a single object, look for imperfections that record historical descent; if several objects are available, try to render them as stages of a single historical process; if processes can be directly observed, sum up their effects through time. One may discuss these principles directly or recognize the “little problems” that Darwin used to exemplify them: orchids, coral reefs, and worms—the middle book, the first, and the last.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Worm for a Century, and All Seasons", p. 132
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Books , Problem , Time

“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.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Unenchanted Evening", p. 39
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

People , Stupidity , Question , Nature

“God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Questioning the Millennium

Questioning the Millennium (second edition, Harmony, 1999), p. 42

God , Business , Tree

“[A]s a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. […] Today […] my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift—a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"The Validation of Continental Drift", pp. 160–61
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Truth , Support , Universe

“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

Age , Evil

“We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading “positive attitude” protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.”

Stephen Jay Gould

Source: Full House (1996), p. 47

Change , Reading , Heart , Personality

“As a nation, we are too young to have true mythic heroes, and we must press real human beings into service. Honest Abe Lincoln the legend is quite a different character from Abraham Lincoln the man. And so should they be. And so should both be treasured, as long as they are distinguished. In a complex and confusing world, the perfect clarity of sports provides a focus for legitimate, utterly unambiguous support [or] disdain. The Dodgers are evil, the Yankees good. They really are, and have been for as long as anyone in my family can remember.”

Stephen Jay Gould

"Diamonds are a Fan's Best Friend", pp. 246–247; originally published in Washington Post Book World (1981-06-21)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

World , Family , Support , Sport

“We inhabit a complex world. Some boundaries are sharp and permit clean and definite distinctions. But nature also includes continua that cannot be neatly parceled into two piles of unambiguous yeses and noes. Biologists have rejected, as fatally flawed in principle, all attempts by anti-abortionists to define an unambiguous “beginning of life,” because we know so well that the sequence from ovulation or spermatogenesis to birth is an unbreakable continuum—and surely no one will define masturbation as murder.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Living with Connections", p. 76
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Life , World , Birth , Nature

“Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered. […] Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.””

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
"Evolution as Fact and Theory", pp. 254–55 (originally appeared in Discover Magazine, May 1981)
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Truth , World , Idea , Science

“The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Nature

“The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor.”

Stephen Jay Gould

"The Streak of Streaks", pp. 186–187; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1988-08-18)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

World , History , Game , Nature

“Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality […] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity", p. 136
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Death , World , Way , Understanding

“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).”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1070

Reality , Change , Time