Quotes from book
The Panda's Thumb

The Panda's Thumb
Stephen Jay Gould

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History is a collection of 31 essays by the Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. It is the second volume culled from his 27-year monthly column "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine.

“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.”

Stephen Jay Gould book 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.
Source: The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

Prologue, p. 16
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change", p. 182
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“There is no gene “for” such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. […] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Caring Groups and Selfish Genes", p. 91
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Darwin's Middle Road", p. 66
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

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

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

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

“Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony—all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide—the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 57
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most “modern” evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of “Neo-Darwinism.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 54
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“The world is full of signals that we don't perceive. Tiny creatures live in a different world of unfamiliar forces. Many animals of our scale greatly exceed our range of perception for sensations familiar to us. […] What an imperceptive lot we are. Surrounded by so much, so fascinating and so real, that we do not see (hear, smell, touch, taste) in nature, yet so gullible and so seduced by claims for novel power that we mistake the tricks of mediocre magicians for glimpses of a psychic world beyond our ken. The paranormal may be a fantasy; it is certainly a haven for charlatans. But “parahuman” powers of perception lie all about us in birds, bees, and bacteria.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Attraction: Bacteria, the Birds, and the Bees", p. 313
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Senseless Signs of History", p. 34
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick", p. 235
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more often a rapid transition between stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinction. Species are the units of nature's morphology.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"A Quahog is a Quahog", p. 213
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“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.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

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

“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.””

Stephen Jay Gould book 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.

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