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  1. 109 quotes from Stephen Jay Gould: 'Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.', 'I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.', and 'We pass ...

    • I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
    • If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism. Stephen Jay Gould. Enemy, Consistent, Ifs.
    • We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
    • The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Stephen Jay Gould. Quirky, Pathways, Evolution.
  2. May 20, 2002 · Stephen Jay Gould. Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light. Stephen Jay Gould. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. Stephen Jay Gould.

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    • Ever Since Darwin
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    Citations are from the W.W. Norton hardcover edition. I am not unmindful of the journalist's quip that yesterday's paper wraps today's garbage. I am also not unmindful of the outrages visited upon our forests to publish redundant and incoherent collections of essays; for, like Dr. Seuss' Lorax, I like to think that I speak for the trees. Beyond van...

    Page references from the W.W. Norton hardcover. Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways. Results rarely specify their causes ...

    Quotations from the W.W. Norton hardcover edition. All versions written for nonscientists speak of fused males as the curious tale of the anglerfish—just as we so often hear about the monkey swinging through the trees, or the worm burrowing through soil. But if nature teaches us any lesson, it loudly proclaims life's diversity. There ain't no such ...

    Published in Discover 6 (June): 40-42. Reproduced with permission on CancerGuide.org
    This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving.
    [T]rying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all.
    The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as...

    Citations are from the Harmony Books hardcover edition. Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. […] A world optimally ad...

    Citations from this monograph refer to the original hardcover edition from Harvard University Press. The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by...

    Quotations from the W.W. Norton hardcover edition. Essays in this collection originally appeared in The New York Review of Books.
    I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
    Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
    I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when...

    This book, intended for a popular audience, described the discovery of soft-bodied fossils in the Burgess Shaleand their reinterpretation seventy years later. Citations are from the W.W. Norton hardcover edition. The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality. I believe […] that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitabl...

    Citations from the W.W. Norton first edition. I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity ...

    Citations are from the W.W. Norton hardcover edition. Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concep...

  4. May 20, 2002 · Here are some of the most interesting quotes from this legend of evolutionary biology. Listed In: Scientists. Intellectuals & Academics. Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. Stephen Jay Gould.

  5. Stephen Jay Gould. The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history. Stephen Jay Gould. Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

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