Stephen Jay Gould

“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a li...”

“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We ma...”

“Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.”

“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 vali...”

“This is a changing world. It changes from day to day, year to year, and from age to age. Rivers deepen their gorges as they carry more land to the sea. Mountains rise, only to be leveled gra...”

“No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mytholog...”

“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; bec...”

“Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.”

“The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a...”

“I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while mo...”

“¿Por qué el origen de la vida pluricelular se dio en forma de un corto pulso a través de tres faunas radicalmente diferentes , y no como un aumento lento y continuo de complejidad? La histor...”

“Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape.”

“As Freud observed, our relationship with science must be paradoxical because we are forced to pay an almost intolerable price for each major gain in knowledge and power—the psychological cos...”

“We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understandi...”

“The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.”

“At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.”

“All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.”

“In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibilit...”

“Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.”

“What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.”