Stephen Jay Gould citations (292 citations, Page 4)

La structure de la théorie de l'évolution, Chapitre 3 les germes de la théorie hiérarchique, 1_ Lamarck est la naissance de l'évolution moderne sur la base d'une théorie invoquant deux types de facteurs

Stephen Jay Gould: Citations en anglais

“Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by "knowing" the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science—or of any honest intellectual inquiry.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"An Essay on a Pig Roast," p. 437
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“Gaskell could not abide this indecorous version of his beloved linear progress theory. He could not bear to imagine that the grand procession from jellyfish to man, orchestrated by an ever-increasing mass of nervous tissue, once paused in its stately and orderly march toward human consciousness in order to execute a fancy little flip, a clever jig of inversion, just at the sublime and definitive moment of entrance into the vertebral home stretch.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1341

“Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Eight Little Piggies

"Tires to Sandals", p. 324
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“Organisms […] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role.”

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

"Quick Lives and Quirky Changes", p. 65
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“All life on earth - everything from bacteria to mushrooms to hippos - shares an astonishing range of detailed biochemical similarities, including the structure of heredity in DNA and RNA, and the universal use of ATP as an energy-storing compound. Two possible scenarios, with markedly different implications for the nature of life, might explain these regularities: either all earthly life shares these features because no other chemistry can work, or these similarities only record the common descent of all organisms on earth from a single origin that happened to feature this chemistry as one possibility among many.”

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

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted—for the constraint of a definite “thing” cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw “evolution” or “social organization,” not to mention the more mundane “digestion” or “self-interest,” without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Eight Little Piggies

"A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 428
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.”

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

"Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 273
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Yes, Shakespeare foremost and forever (Darwin too). But also teach about the excellence of pygmy bushcraft and Fuegian survival in the world's harshest climate. Dignity and inspiration come in many guises. Would anyone choose the tinhorn patriotism of George Armstrong Custer over the eloquence of Chief Joseph in defeat?”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Eight Little Piggies

"The Moral State of Tahiti—and of Darwin", p. 274
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Ever Since Darwin

"Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

“As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 183
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality). But the prods often include dreams, quirks, and errors—just as we may obtain crucial bursts of energy from foodstuffs or pharmaceuticals of no objective or enduring value. Great truth can emerge from small error. Evolution is thrilling, liberating, and correct. And Macrauchenia is a litoptern.”

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

"Mr. Sophia's Pony", pp. 157 - 158
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Ever Since Darwin

"The Reverent Thomas' Dirty Little Planet", p. 141
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

“A hot topic of late, expressed most notably in Bernie Siegel's best-selling books, has emphasized the role of positive attitude in combating such serious diseases as cancer. From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Source: Full House (1996), p. 47

“Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Flamingo's Smile

"Of Wasps and WASPs", p. 161
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

“Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1001

“Flies can eat toads! (Although astonishment may be lessened in noting that the tiny toads are much smaller than enormous fly larvae.) Unusually large insects and maximally small vertebrates have also been featured in the few other recorded cases of such reversals - frogs, small birds, even a mouse, consumed by praying mantids, for example.”

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

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 396
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre I Have Landed

Preface, p. 6
I Have Landed (2002)

“Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Eight Little Piggies

"More Light on Leaves", p. 165
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Panda's Thumb

"Shades of Lamarck", p. 76
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 60

“South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American… are all recent migrants from North America.”

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

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

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

"Evolution as Fact and Theory", p. 260
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“[I]f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only for aesthetic or commercial value. Primates are visual animals, and (particularly in science) illustration has a language and set of conventions all its own.”

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

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 18

“I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. […] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me", p. 29
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“Since the universe must contain millions of appropriate planets, consciousness in some form - but not with the paired eyes and limbs, and the brain built of neurons in the only example we know - may evolve frequently. But if only one origin of life in a million ever leads to consciousness, then Martian bacteria most emphatically do not imply Little Green Men.)”

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

"War of the Worldviews", p. 351
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“[T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the “culture wars” that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general […]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"Room of One's Own", p. 355
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

“Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Ever Since Darwin

"Uniformity and Catastrophe", p. 147
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

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