“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.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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