People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions – words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

— Stephen Jay Gould

All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again – finally turning into an expectation – then theories are overturned.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

— Stephen Jay Gould

I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.

— Stephen Jay Gould

I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.

— Stephen Jay Gould

I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

— Stephen Jay Gould

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.

— Stephen Jay Gould

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

— Stephen Jay Gould
About Stories

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.

— Stephen Jay Gould

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.

— Stephen Jay Gould

What’s important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.

— Stephen Jay Gould
Reading

If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range...

— Stephen Jay Gould

In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

— Stephen Jay Gould

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.

— Stephen Jay Gould

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it’s what we’re made of, it’s what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.

— Stephen Jay Gould

You put three facts together – that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there’s variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited – and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

— Stephen Jay Gould

All organisms vary, and it’s just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it’s true. Darwin didn’t know the mechanism of heredity, but you don’t have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

— Stephen Jay Gould
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