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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
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. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. Stephen Jay Gould Read Quote
