Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information.

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted, he must also be right.

With copious evidence ranging from Plato’s haughtiness to Beethoven’s tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I don’t make it, I’ll be very sad that there are things I didn’t do, but I’m happy that I’ve done what I have.

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

I’m not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things – not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.

I think there have to be Bachs and Beethovens. We may have – there are so many more people. Musical training is available to so many more, but it may be that we’ve hit a right wall in terms of accessible styles and since we demand innovation as a criterion of genius, there may not be more innovative styles to be found.

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam – I break in order to reveal.

I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.

I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn’t be serious.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.