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 Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as ‘the intelligent layperson’ does exist – in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
