Stephen Jay Gould citations (292 citations, Page 9)

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

grand-mère , problème , faute

Stephen Jay Gould: Citations en anglais

“Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.” Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that “irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.””

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Panda's Thumb

"Bathybius and Eozoon", pp. 243–244
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 329
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Source: The Mismeasure of Man (1996), p. 139

“How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord.”

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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)

“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.”

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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)

“Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Source: Full House (1996), p. 212

“Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 320
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.
"A Time to Laugh", p. 82; originally published as "A Happy Mystery to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?" in The Wall Street Journal (2001-10-10)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1342

“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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre I Have Landed

An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

“If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would surely have corrected his earlier report that apes showed more promise than Old World monkeys and noted that monkeys had overcome an original disadvantage to gain domination among primates.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Eight Little Piggies

He will confirm this statement after his visit next year—but also add a footnote that one species from the ape bush has enjoyed an unusual and unexpected flowering, thus demanding closer monitoring.
"The Declining Empire of Apes", p. 288
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Aristotle, and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.
"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 256
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

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

“I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.
Prologue, p. 13
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Wonderful Life

Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.
Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. […] We know nothing about them because of the survivorlship bias.””

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Stephen Jay Gould livre The Panda's Thumb

"Wide hats and narrow minds" https://books.google.com/books?id=-lWtVSZoqWkC&pg=PA776 New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151 https://books.google.com/books?id=z0XY7Rg_lOwC&pg=PA151.

“Yesterday’s seer is today’s bore.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre An Urchin in the Storm

"The Quack Detector", p. 244
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Few campaigns are more dangerous than emotional calls for proscription rather than thought.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre An Urchin in the Storm

"Integrity and Mr. Rifkin", p. 238
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Scientists ignorant of history are not so much condemned to repeat it, as to be confused and unenterprising.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 187
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Useful quantification is so often the key to fruitful science.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 184
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

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

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Stephen Jay Gould livre Wonderful Life

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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre 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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre 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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre 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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould livre An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Perils of Hope", p. 211
Contexte: 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.