Stephen Jay Gould: Humanity

Stephen Jay Gould was American evolutionary biologist. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.
Stephen Jay Gould: 548 quotes1 like

“If I could have those sixty seconds within Bradypus… would I not receive a plea for humans to pause, reassess - and above all, slow down?”

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

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 391
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

Source: Eight Little Piggies (1993) "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282

“Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Deep Time and Ceaseless Motion", p. 98
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"The Ghost of Protagoras", p. 64
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources—certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. […] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history—and you become an acive agent, not merely a “reporter.””

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

Introduction, p. 6
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“[S]cientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits […]. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain—as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), pp. 6–7

“I am not […] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. […] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“[S]cience is often regarded as the most objective and truth-directed of human enterprises, and since direct observation is supposed to be the favored route to factuality, many people equate respectable science with visual scrutiny—just the facts ma'am, and palpably before my eyes. But science is a battery of observational and inferential methods, all directed to the testing of propositions that can, in principle, be definitely proven false. […] At all scales, from smallest to largest, quickest to slowest, many well-documented conclusions of science lie beyond the strictly limited domain of direct observation. No one has ever seen an electron or a black hole, the events of a picosecond or a geological eon.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Muller Bros. Moving & Storage", pp. 200–201
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the “stuff” of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any “objective” basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?”

Stephen Jay Gould

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82

“Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of “traditional values” and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.”

Stephen Jay Gould

"Good Sports & Bad", p. 325; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“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

“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