Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory. Stephen Jay Gould More Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould More Quotes From Stephen Jay Gould Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases. Stephen Jay Gould track men heaven We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of "easy listening". Stephen Jay Gould information listening culture The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress. Stephen Jay Gould expansion progress life Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession. Stephen Jay Gould men life science Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. Stephen Jay Gould angel house numbers The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm. Stephen Jay Gould paradigm evolution science Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought. Stephen Jay Gould hope comforting science The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. Stephen Jay Gould philosophical plato philosophy We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night. Stephen Jay Gould bombs cities night Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning. Stephen Jay Gould decent writing needs We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes ; and we can trace the products of these genes ( enzymes and proteins ) as they influence the course of embryology . In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies. Stephen Jay Gould discovery animal years Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality). Stephen Jay Gould bonus latin reality No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament". Stephen Jay Gould mixtures defining facts The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined. Stephen Jay Gould machines doubt animal Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased. Stephen Jay Gould analysis sound opportunity I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology). Stephen Jay Gould religious science commitment I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal. Stephen Jay Gould hammers tools order I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. Stephen Jay Gould writing wonderful thinking Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences. Stephen Jay Gould three evolution two All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation. Stephen Jay Gould variation biologist essence
