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Stephen Jay Gould

307 quotes

“Flies can eat toads! (Although astonishment may be lessened in noting that the tiny toads are much smaller than enormous fly larvae.) Unusually large insects and maximally small vertebrates have also been featured in the few other recorded cases of such reversals - frogs, small birds, even a mouse, consumed by praying mantids, for example.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one supposed that dinoflagellates might actively kill fish as an evolved response for their own specific advantage, including a potential nutritional benefit for the algal cells. And yet the dinoflagellates do seem to be killing and eating fishes in a manner suggesting active evolution for this most peculiar reversal.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make “novelty seeking” or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes “for” particular items of anatomy or behavior.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Without and Within of Smart Mice", p. 234 (originally appeared in Time, 1999-09-13)
“The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
“Substantial changes, introduced during the last half of the 20th century, have built a structure so expanded beyond the original Darwinian core, and so enlarged by new principles of macroevolutionary explanation, that the full exposition, while remaining within the domain of Darwinian logic, must be construed as basically different from the canonical theory of natural selection, rather than simply extended.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms of speciation; punctuated equilibrium merely takes a standard microevolutionary model and elucidates its expected expression when properly scaled into geological time.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 1001
“Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 1009
“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 (1941–2002) first seen 1070 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 1070
“And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1341 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 1341
“I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. […] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability. (I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.)”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Time to Laugh", p. 82; originally published as "A Happy Mystery to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?" in The Wall Street Journal (2001-10-10)
“The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Streak of Streaks", pp. 186–187; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1988-08-18)
“As a nation, we are too young to have true mythic heroes, and we must press real human beings into service. Honest Abe Lincoln the legend is quite a different character from Abraham Lincoln the man. And so should they be. And so should both be treasured, as long as they are distinguished. In a complex and confusing world, the perfect clarity of sports provides a focus for legitimate, utterly unambiguous support [or] disdain. The Dodgers are evil, the Yankees good. They really are, and have been for as long as anyone in my family can remember.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diamonds are a Fan's Best Friend", pp. 246–247; originally published in Washington Post Book World (1981-06-21)
“Mythology is wondrous, a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility […]. At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential take of monarchs and battles.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 259; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (1990-10-11)
“In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence […]. Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 272; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (1990-10-11)
“Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of “traditional values” and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Good Sports & Bad", p. 325; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
“many evolutionary biologists consider Gould’s writings a serious impediment to popular understanding of Darwinian thought.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Robert Wright, New York Review of Books, 14 August 1997
“Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about—not just the answers, but even the questions—are consistently misleading.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of the subjects Steve dealt with were meant to be illustrative precisely of the complexity and diversity of the processes and products of evolution. Despite the immense diversity of matters on which he wrote there was, underneath, a unifying theme: that the complexity of the living world cannot be treated as a manifestation of some grand general principle, but that each case must be understood by examining it from the ground up and as the realization of one out of many material paths of causation.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, "Stephen Jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?" (obituary), Monthly Review, reprinted in Oliver Sacks, ed., The Best American Science Writing 2003, p. 247.
“What is particularly delightful about Steve's writing is the virtuosity with which he connects seemingly unrelated subjects to illuminate and strengthen his arguments. Whether right or wrong, Steve is always stimulating, and this is perhaps where he has made his greatest contribution—in awakening in thousands, if not millions, of his readers an enthusiasm for the secrets of this wonderful world of ours.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ernst Mayr, "This view of Stephen Jay Gould" Natural History 108 (Nov. 1999): 54.
“Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals... very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lynn Margulis, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution ed. John Brockman (1995)
“I can't say much about Gould’s strengths as a scientist, but for a long time I've regarded him as the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn).”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ronald Numbers, as quoted in Michael Shermer, "This View of Science" Social Studies of Science 32/4 (August 2002): 492.
“Although Haldane accepted the earlier and incorrect paleontological interpretation of the fossil record of Gryphaea, in his overall belief that the pace of evolution was rapid and seemingly discontinuous, rather than slow and continuous, he anticipated, at least in part and by three decades, the model of punctuated equilibria, which was proposed by... Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)
“According to Gould and Eldredge, the reason why so many links are missing is that they simply do not exist. They take the view that biological evolution proceeds in successive stages of "punctuated equilibrium." Living species would remain unchanged for extremely long stretches of time, and then undergo profound changes in relatively short periods. To borrow a term from the quantum theory of atoms, evolution would occur in "quantum jumps." It is very likely that the spark of life appeared during the first such "jump.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trinh Xuan Thuan, Chaos and Harmony (2001)
“a book which exemplifies its own thesis. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, researched in the service of a point of view rather than written from a fund of knowledge.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Steve Blinkhorn, "What Skulduggery?", Nature 296 (8 April 1982): 506.
“a masterpiece of deception”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed to Chris Brand by Richard Lynn, 2002
“How can one trust a person so prejudiced as to neglect overwhelming evidence?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hans J. Eysenck, Intelligence: A New Look. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998, , p. 94
“[Gould's] historical account is highly selective; he asserts the non-objectivity of science so that he can test for scientific truth, flagrantly, by the standards of his own social and political convictions; and by linking his critique to the quest for fairness and justice, he exploits the generous instincts of his readers.… In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bernard Davis, in "Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press" in The Public Interest (Fall 1983), p. 73
“In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Arthur Jensen, "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons" Contemporary Education Review 1:2, 1982
“Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Arthur Jensen, "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons" Contemporary Education Review 1:2, 1982
“I just didn't trust Gould... I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of 'The Mismeasure of Man' came and he never even bothered to mention Michael's [John S. Michael] study, I just felt he was a charlatan.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ralph L. Holloway, 2011
“Steve’s errors are very extensive and the bias very serious. A careful reanalysis shows that his target is unblemished while his own attack is biased in all the ways Gould attributes to his victim.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Robert Trivers, "Fraud in the Imputation of Fraud: The Mis-measure of Stephen Jay Gould", Psychology Today, 4 October 2012.
“He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearman—and demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract. It is this sort of performance that makes the book's eventual refutation of Arthur Jensen seem incidental, for it is far more absorbing to have our powers of reason challenged than it is to have our social consciences shaken.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Books Of The Times" The New York Times, 1997-11-09, p. C29
“A rare book—at once of great importance and wonderful to read.… Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology, recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.… A major addition to the scientific literature.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power of Gould's analysis lies in his focus on particulars. Rather than attempt a grand critique of all “scientific” efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard York and Brett Clark, "Debunking as Positive Science: Reflections in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man", Monthly Review 57:9, February, 2006
“We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a “transitional object”—a baby's warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), p. 178
“But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the “stuff” of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any “objective” basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82
“Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact—which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: After the McLean v. Arkansas creationism trial, as quoted in Review of the National Center for Science Education Vol. 24, No. 6 (November–December 2004)
“It's his last book. He wrote in in 1881, the year before he died, and usually we expect that in old age, just before death, that a great scientist will write a pontificating philosophical treatise on the nature of reality. And Darwin... wrote a book on worms. ...He was interested in worms because they were... a metaphor for his larger world-view. The worms that slowly churn the topsoil of England... that work literally beneath our feet, that we never notice, that we think are insignificant because they're so small and lowly, are in fact producing the very soil that is the basis of agriculture. And therefore Darwin uses it as a metaphor for the importance of apparently tiny things when you extend them over long periods of time. And that's what evolution is, the extension of small change (to Darwin) over vast periods of time. So the worms become a metaphor for evolution and for the whole process of temporal change, a very fascinating book.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stephen Jay Gould: The Unanswerable" (Aug 30, 2016) , A Glorious Accident (6 of 7) 22:01.
“But here I stop—short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors—from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call “free will,” determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum—extreme altruism to extreme selfishness—that our genes permit.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source