Stephen Jay Gould citáty (274 citátov, page 9)

I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.
"A Time to Laugh", p. 82; originally published as "A Happy Mystery to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?" in The Wall Street Journal (2001-10-10)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.
Zdroj: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1342

“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha I Have Landed

An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

“If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would surely have corrected his earlier report that apes showed more promise than Old World monkeys and noted that monkeys had overcome an original disadvantage to gain domination among primates.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha Eight Little Piggies

He will confirm this statement after his visit next year—but also add a footnote that one species from the ape bush has enjoyed an unusual and unexpected flowering, thus demanding closer monitoring.
"The Declining Empire of Apes", p. 288
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Aristotle, and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.
"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 256
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.
"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.
Prologue, p. 13
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha Wonderful Life

Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.
Zdroj: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

“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. […] We know nothing about them because of the survivorlship bias.””

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha The Panda's Thumb

"Wide hats and narrow minds" https://books.google.com/books?id=-lWtVSZoqWkC&pg=PA776 New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151 https://books.google.com/books?id=z0XY7Rg_lOwC&pg=PA151.

“Yesterday’s seer is today’s bore.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

"The Quack Detector", p. 244
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Few campaigns are more dangerous than emotional calls for proscription rather than thought.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

"Integrity and Mr. Rifkin", p. 238
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Scientists ignorant of history are not so much condemned to repeat it, as to be confused and unenterprising.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 187
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Useful quantification is so often the key to fruitful science.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 184
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha Wonderful Life

Zdroj: Wonderful Life (1989), Preface

“Nature has no automatically transferable wisdom to serve as the basis of human morality. Passive observation and unquestioned reverence for nature are no substitute for ethical philosophy.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

Zdroj: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Utopia, Limited", p. 225

“The world is a complex place. In our struggles to simplify and understand, we often identify some bugbear and then make it responsible for all evils.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

Zdroj: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Utopia, Limited", p. 218

“Jastrow and a few other astronomers have tried to find God in the universe by reading the big bang as the cosmological equivalent of Genesis. I confess that I have found it hard to take this argument seriously.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

Zdroj: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Perils of Hope", p. 212

“Life is a ramifying bush with millions of branches, not a ladder.”

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Stephen Jay Gould kniha An Urchin in the Storm

Zdroj: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Perils of Hope", p. 211
Kontext: Darwinism is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments, not a tale of inevitable progress. “After long reflection,” Darwin wrote, “I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists.”
Jastrow might argue that he is only considering the single pathway through the immense labyrinth of life’s bush that happened to lead to us. Even here I might reply that while we have a personal motive for special interest in (and affection for) this particular pathway, we have no right to regard it (or any other) as the essential direction of life. The pathways leading to aardvarks, anchovies, or artichokes are just as long, intricate, and biologically informative.