Stephen Jay Gould: Trending quotes

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Stephen Jay Gould: 548 quotes1 like

“The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.”

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), Preface

“Nature has no automatically transferable wisdom to serve as the basis of human morality. Passive observation and unquestioned reverence for nature are no substitute for ethical philosophy.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Utopia, Limited", p. 225

“The world is a complex place. In our struggles to simplify and understand, we often identify some bugbear and then make it responsible for all evils.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Utopia, Limited", p. 218

“Jastrow and a few other astronomers have tried to find God in the universe by reading the big bang as the cosmological equivalent of Genesis. I confess that I have found it hard to take this argument seriously.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Perils of Hope", p. 212

“Life is a ramifying bush with millions of branches, not a ladder.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Perils of Hope", p. 211
Context: Darwinism is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments, not a tale of inevitable progress. “After long reflection,” Darwin wrote, “I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists.”
Jastrow might argue that he is only considering the single pathway through the immense labyrinth of life’s bush that happened to lead to us. Even here I might reply that while we have a personal motive for special interest in (and affection for) this particular pathway, we have no right to regard it (or any other) as the essential direction of life. The pathways leading to aardvarks, anchovies, or artichokes are just as long, intricate, and biologically informative.

“Just as no one is quite so stupid as to nullify biology completely, so too does no one deny some flexibility in the translation of genes into complex behaviors.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Nurturing Nature", p. 152

“No serious student of human behavior denies the potent influence of evolved biology upon our cultural lives. Our struggle is to figure out how biology affects us, not whether it does.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Nurturing Nature", p. 152

“An overtly expressed political commitment does not debar a scientist from viewing nature accurately—if only because no honest scientist or effective political activist would be foolish enough to advance a program in evident discord with the world as we find it.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Nurturing Nature", p. 150

“No one doubts that biological universals exist. We must sleep, eat, and grow older, and we are not about to give up procreation; almost all our social institutions are influenced by these imperatives.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Genes on the Brain", p. 113