Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay Gould

Life, Time, Through

People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs to them that if they're asking for it and another thousand people are asking, I don't have 1,000 five minutes to give.
Stephen Jay Gould

Time, Give, Another

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

Science, Human, Done

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
Stephen Jay Gould

Science, Human, Acting

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

Important, Needs, Subject

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould

Best, Question, Stories

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Stephen Jay Gould

Lies, Evolution, Proof

There wasn't much technical terminology, and then, most academics are not trained in writing. And there is what is probably worse than ever before, the growing use of professional jargon.
Stephen Jay Gould

Writing, Before, Growing

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Stephen Jay Gould

Time, Natural, Biology

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

Life, History, Constant

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Scientist

Born: September 10, 1941

Died: May 20, 2002

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Cite this Page: Citation

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