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Stephen Jay Gould

307 quotes

“Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled—while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most “obvious,” “accurate,” and “natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]ruly grand and powerful theories […] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. […] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality). But the prods often include dreams, quirks, and errors—just as we may obtain crucial bursts of energy from foodstuffs or pharmaceuticals of no objective or enduring value. Great truth can emerge from small error. Evolution is thrilling, liberating, and correct. And Macrauchenia is a litoptern.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each and every loss becomes an instance of ultimate tragedy—something that once was, but shall never be known to us. The hump of the giant deer—as a nonfossilizable item of soft anatomy—should have fallen into the maw of erased history. But our ancestors provided a wondrous rescue, and we should rejoice mightily. Every new item can instruct us; every unexpected object possesses beauty for its own sake; every rescue from history's great shredding machine is—and I don't know how else to say this—a holy act of salvation for a bit of totality.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I went to the movies to see Independence Day, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can't survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.)”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nearly anyone in this line of work would take a bullet for the last pregnant dodo. But should we not admire the person who, when faced with an overwhelmingly sad reality beyond personal blame or control, strives valiantly to rescue whatever can be salvaged, rather than retreating to the nearest corner to weep or assign fault?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I love these tales because, in more reasonable attributions of motive, they so beautifully embody a fundamental theme of historical explanation - that consequences of substantial import often arise from triggers of entirely different intent. In other words, current utility bears no necessary relationship with historical origin.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius, in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet's Madness.)”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the neck of the giraffe elongates an inch at a time, then the full panoply of supporting structures need not arise at every step. The coordinated adaptation can be built piecemeal. Some animals may slightly elongate the neck, others the legs; still others may develop stronger neck muscles. By sexual reproduction, the favorable features of different organisms may be combined in offspring.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.)”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for humorous or sarcastic effect, the intended meaning of a word becomes directly opposite to the usual sense...”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Henry Fairfield Osborn, the dominant paleontologist of his era, and long time director of the American Museum of Natural History, gave the "standard version in his popular book of 1918, The Origin and Evolution of Life... "Lamarck attributed the lengthening of the [giraffe's] neck to the inheritance of bodily modifications caused by the neck-stretching habit. Darwin attributed the lengthening of the neck to the constant selection of individuals and races which were born with the longest necks. Darwin was probably right." …The version has held ever since.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration (falsely assuming that the tale possesses a weight of history and a sanction of evidence), then we are in for trouble - as critics properly nail the particular weakness, and then assume that the whole theory must be in danger if supporters choose such a fatuous case as a primary illustration.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck originally evolved for this purpose. The neck may have first lengthened in context of a different use, and then been coopted for better dining when giraffes moved into the open plains. Or the neck may have evolved to perform several functions at once. We cannot learn the reasons for historical origin simply by listing current uses.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In France, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire attempted to portray the skeleton of vertebrates as a set of modifications upon an archetypal vertebra. In the 1820's, Geoffroy extended his ambitious plan to include annelids and arthropods under that same rubric. ...Vertebrates support their soft parts with an internal skeleton, but insects must live within their vertebrae (a reality, not a metaphor, for Geoffroy). This comparison led to... the claim that a vertebrate rib must represent the same organ as an arthropod leg - and that insects must therefore walk on their own ribs!”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Geoffrey also recognized that the opposite orientations of gut and nervous system posed a problem for his claim that insects and vertebrates represent different versions of the same archetypal animal - and he proposed the first account of the inversion theory to resolve this threat to unification. ...Geoffroy pursued the... aim of establishing a "unity of type" that could generate both arthropods and vertebrates from the same basic blueprint. ...The single grand design includes a gut in the middle and the main nerve cords somewhere on the periphery.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually turned over to become the first vertebrates (for the classical statement of the inversion theory, see William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, 1920).”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gaskell could not abide this indecorous version of his beloved linear progress theory. He could not bear to imagine that the grand procession from jellyfish to man, orchestrated by an ever-increasing mass of nervous tissue, once paused in its stately and orderly march toward human consciousness in order to execute a fancy little flip, a clever jig of inversion, just at the sublime and definitive moment of entrance into the vertebral home stretch.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gaskell... had to keep his stately soldiers upright and uniformly oriented... by crafting the brain and spinal cord from an arthropod digestive tube, while forming a completely new gut below. ...Gaskell thought that his move would rescue the theory of linear progress, with its necessary transition of arthropod into vertebrate, from the absurdities of the old inversion theory.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection... Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the universe must contain millions of appropriate planets, consciousness in some form - but not with the paired eyes and limbs, and the brain built of neurons in the only example we know - may evolve frequently. But if only one origin of life in a million ever leads to consciousness, then Martian bacteria most emphatically do not imply Little Green Men.)”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We now live, as Earth always has (see my 1996 book Full House), in an Age of Bacteria. These simplest organisms will dominate our planet (if conditions remain hospitable for life at all) until the sun explodes. During our current, and undoubtedly brief, geological moment, they watch with appropriate amusement as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage. For we are, to them, only transient and delectable islands ripe for potential exploitation.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unfortunately, all life on earth - the only life we know - represents, for all its current variety, the results of a single experiment, for every earthly species evolved from the common ancestry of a single origin. We desperately need a repetition of the experiment (several would be better, but let's not be greedy!) in order to make a judgement. Mars represents our first real hope for a second experiment - the sine qua non - for any proper answer for the question of questions.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This essay treats the most celebrated story in the extreme simplification in an adult parasite - in the interests of illuminating, reconciling, and, perhaps, even resolving two major biases that have so hindered our understanding of natural history: the misequation of evolution with progress, and the undervaluing of an organism by considering only its adult form and not the entire life cycle.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The parasite has somehow evolved to turn off the host's defenses, presumably by disarming the crab's immune response with some chemical trickery that fools the host into accepting the parasite as part of itself. ...The adult parasite castrates the host, not by directly eating the gonadal tissue, but by some unknown mechanism probably involving penetration of the interna's roots around and into the crab's nervous system.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lernaeodiscus porcellanae turns control of the host into a fine art. After castration by the parasite, male crabs develop female characteristics in both anatomy and behavior, while females become even more feminized. The emerging externa then takes the same form and position as the crab's own egg mass... The crabs then treat the externa as their own brood. In other words, the parasite usurps all the complex care normally invested in the crab's own progeny.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In short, the root-head turns the crab into a Darwinian cipher, a feeding machine working entirely in the parasite's service. The castrated crab can make no contribution to its own evolutionary history; its "Darwinian fitness" has become flat zero. ...But ever so carefully, for the parasite must maintain the crab in constant and perfect servitude - not draining the host enough to kill this golden goose, but not letting the crab do anything for its own Darwinian benefit.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The intricate and different life cycles of both male and female root-heads, and the great behavioral sophistication shown by the female in reconfiguring a host crab as a support system, all underscore the myopia of our conventional wisdom in regarding rhizocephalans as degenerate parasites because the adult anatomy of internal roots and external sac seem so simple.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our indirect methods have taught us a mountain of things about horses, but if you wished to learn even more, would you rather be Whirlaway in the stretch, than interview Eddie Arcaro afterwards?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident […] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border—and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American... are all recent migrants from North America.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I could have those sixty seconds within Bradypus... would I not receive a plea for humans to pause, reassess - and above all, slow down?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Natural historians tend to avoid tendentious preaching in this philosophical mode (although I often fall victim to such temptations in these essays). Our favored style of doubting is empirical: if I wish to question your proposed generality, I will search for a counterexample in flesh and blood. Such counterexamples exist in abundance, for they form a staple in a standard genre of writing in natural history — the “wonderment of oddity” or “strange ways of the beaver” tradition.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source