I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious. Stephen Jay Gould More Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould More Quotes From Stephen Jay Gould The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought. Stephen Jay Gould progress understanding science The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning. Stephen Jay Gould errors two religion The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism. Stephen Jay Gould theory-of-evolution yield doe Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Stephen Jay Gould paleontology groups levels For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time. Stephen Jay Gould battle evolution body Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers. Stephen Jay Gould orchids flower beautiful The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion Stephen Jay Gould enemy The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. Stephen Jay Gould behave refuse world I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me. Stephen Jay Gould skeletons scared becoming Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious. Stephen Jay Gould serious facts way Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. Stephen Jay Gould ignorant morning long The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould fossils design imagination Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study. Stephen Jay Gould fancy data views But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology. Stephen Jay Gould robots self thinking Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage-good teaching-than a bill forcing our honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?. Stephen Jay Gould teaching teacher science The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. Stephen Jay Gould fog science thinking Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers. Stephen Jay Gould discipline knowing interesting Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans. Stephen Jay Gould ocean simple years At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation. Stephen Jay Gould pathways adaptation advantage The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations. Stephen Jay Gould foundation evolution lying
