“ The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 may not be suited to it, but here we are. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalismand is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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- Copy
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“ 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 gradually by winds and rain. Continents rise and sink into the sea. Such are the gradual changes of the physical earth as days add into years and years combine to become ages. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 may not be suited to it, but here we are. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalismand is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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- Copy
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“ 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 mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: halfbaked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely selfimposed, for extended geological longevity. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 cost of progressive dethronement from the center of things, and increasing marginality in an uncaring universe. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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 limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. ”
- Stephen Jay Gould- Copy
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“ 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- Copy
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