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)
“I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.”
"Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002Related quotes
"Literary bias on the slippery slope", p. 252
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”
Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 63
Prologue, p. 13
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Learning to Fly: A Memoir of Hanging On and Letting Go (New York: Touchstone, 2015), pp. 83 https://books.google.it/books?id=IIDRCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA83-84.
On her thought process in “What I think: Yiyun Li” https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/12/10/what-i-think-yiyun-li (Princeton University; 2018 Dec 10)

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/pat_quotes/hindus.htm

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 328.