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3d9aa67
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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.
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tragedy
hope
life
hesitation
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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1478bd8
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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.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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6552089
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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.
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science
intelligence
life
stewardship
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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48402ee
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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.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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64cdfa6
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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.
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science
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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fbef0cd
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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..
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Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack) |
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f9095c8
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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: half-baked 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 d..
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science
outdoors
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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0b42db3
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The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor -- not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies "out there" in the woods), but because we need a shift to mor..
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metaphor
mind
nature
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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a0009a7
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Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny -- and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).
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evolution
science
rigor
scrutiny
objectivity
rationality
evidence
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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f7be697
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Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
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natural-history
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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4d58670
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If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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8017096
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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."
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writing
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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b0fee0a
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Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as "Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental." A 60 percent (or whatever) "heritability" for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the "interactionism" we all accept does not permit such statements as "Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic." When causative factors (mo..
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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292e65a
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Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.
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science
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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d1fc2a2
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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.
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evolution
science
panda
thumb
cat
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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421225c
|
We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
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stephen-jay-gould
quotes
|
Stephen Jay Gould |
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87acdf1
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Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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92058e7
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Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run.
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evolution
humanity
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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5d7c085
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Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.
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morality
religion
science
ethics
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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3036f90
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Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.
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women
heritage
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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53d8229
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Scientific questions cannot be decided by majority vote in any case.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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4329318
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science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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4915637
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Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.
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progress
revolution
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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ca42755
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I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in trouble): this population must disappear by hybridization with mottled shells toward bank-interior coasts and with ribby snails toward the bank-edge. We hiked west toward the bank-interior and easily found hybrids right on the verge of the airpo..
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understanding
prediction
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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2cd5758
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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."
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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e1c88bb
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We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity...
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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379f0f4
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This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.
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evolution
history
science
consensus
ernst-mayr
charles-darwin
darwinian
darwin
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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c82c49f
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We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a "transitional object"--a baby's warm blanket for adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted m..
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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33c61e3
|
Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
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human-species
natural-history
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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8570c1a
|
The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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c5398b6
|
Genius has as many components as the mind itself.
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stephen jay gould |
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31e10a6
|
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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fbb75a6
|
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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5d1a01d
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Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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b4238fc
|
Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film...
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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4b91b0b
|
Duke est desipere in loco [it is pleasant to act foolishly from time to time--a line from Horace].
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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40b4729
|
The Mismeasure of Man treats one particular form of quantified claim about the ranking of human groups: the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth. Fortunately--and I made my decision on purpose--this limited subject embodies the deepest (and most common) philosophical error, with the most fundamental and far-rangi..
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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1bd6f92
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self-deception as the preliminary to public deception is almost automatic. --WALTER LIPPMANN,
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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46596a5
|
Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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88b192a
|
In Darwins post-platonische werelds is de variatie de fundamentele werkelijkheid en veranderen berekende gemiddelden in abstracties. We blijven echter de voorkeur geven aan het oudere en tegengestelde standpunt: we zien variatie nog steeds als een massa onlogische toevalligheden, die hoofdzakelijk van waarde is omdat zo'n spreiding te gebruiken is voor de berekening van een gemiddelde, hetgeen we dan beschouwen als iets wat een essentie nog..
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evolutie
variatie
plato
|
Stephen Jay Gould |
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9b25f4e
|
Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes human judgement and ingenuity upon all proceedings. It is, after all (although we sometimes forget it), practiced by humans.
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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7db3858
|
Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement--and not like the men who served as a cannon fodder in World War I, dug into the trenches of a senseless and apparently interminable conflict, while lobbing bullets and canisters of poison gas at a supposed enemy, who, like any soldier, just wanted to get off the battlefield and on with a potentially productive and..
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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8d7e27c
|
But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?
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Stephen Jay Gould |
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65e39e8
|
The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonder..
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evolution
history
life
burgess-shale
opabinia
wonderful-life
|
Stephen Jay Gould |