|
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (1941 - 2002) US geologist , paleontologist , evolutionary biologist and popular-science author
Sourced
Quotations from Gould's essays are divided up according to the collection in which they first appeared. Most were originally published in Natural History magazine.
The Panda's Thumb (1980)
- "Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome."
- "Senseless signs of history"
- "Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote; 'Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.' Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that 'irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.'"
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)
- "Human Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History."
Bully for Bronosaurus (1991)
- "The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves)."
- "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. 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."
- "Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years."
- "Literary bias on the slippery slope"
- "We should study the past for the simplest of reasons—to increase our "sample size" in modes of thought, for we need all the help we can get."
- "Literary bias on the slippery slope"
- "The story of a theory's failure often strikes readers as sad and unsatisfying. Since science thrives on self-correction, we who practice this most challenging of human arts do not share such a feeling. We may be unhappy if a favored hypothesis loses or chagrined if theories that we proposed prove inadequate. But refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment, even when [...] no new and comprehensive theory has yet filled the void."
Eight Little Piggies (1993)
- "The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without."
- "Men of the thirty-third division: an essay on integrity"
- "Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?"
- "Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision."
The Mismeasure of Man (1996)
Quotation from the second edition from W.W. Norton.
- "Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled--while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.)"
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)
Page references are to the original Harmony Books hardcover edition.
- "Will we ever again be able to view a public object with civic dignity, unencumbered by commercial messages? Must city buses be fully painted as movable ads, lampposts smothered, taxis festooned, even seats in concert halls sold one by one to donors and embellished in perpetuity with their names on silver plaques?"
- "The Lying Stones of Marrakech", p. 25
- "The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier 's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly."
- "The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
- "Christopher Wren , the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No eleborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: ‘si monumentum requiris, circumspice’—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacredness—of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance."
- "A Tale of Two Work Sites", p. 251
- "No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call ‘temperament.’"
- "The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W", p. 281
- "[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make ‘novelty seeking’ or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation."
- "The Internal Brand of the Scarlet W", p. 282
- "[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds."
- "Of Embryos and Ancestors", p. 318
- "[T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely diffreing scales bears an important implication for the ‘culture wars ’ that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general [...]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify—but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent—and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia , but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline."
- "Room of One's Own", p. 355
I Have Landed (2002)
Page references are to the original Harmony Books hardcover edition.
- "In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original langauges (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue)."
- "No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern."
- "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48
- "Darwin grasped the philosophical bleakness with his characteristic courage. He argued that hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not ‘discovered’ in nature. We must formulate these answers for ourselves and then approach nature as a partner who can answer other kinds of questions for us—questions about the factual state of the universe, not about the meaning of human life. If we grant nature the independence of her own domain—her answers unframed in human terms—then we can grasp her exquisite beauty in a free and humble way. For then we become liberated to approach nature without the burden of an inappropriate and umpossible quest for moral messages to assuage our hopes and fears. We can pay our proper respect to nature's independence and read her own ways as beauty or inspiration in our different terms."
- "Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes", p. 109
- "Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes ‘for’ particular items of anatomy or behavior."
- "The Without and Within of Smart Mice", p. 234 (originally appeared in Time, 1999-09-13)
- "The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright."
- "Tales of a Feathered Tail", p. 331
- "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. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincouty in 1415.)"
- "The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
Page references are to the original Harvard Belknap edition.
- "Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus, or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality)."
- "And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati—who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster."
- "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. 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."
Other works
- "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 our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom."
- Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), p. 178
- "But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the ‘stuff’ of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any ‘objective’ basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?"
- The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82
Quotations about Stephen Jay Gould
- "Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on this side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
- "Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading."
- "Most of the subjects Steve dealt with were meant to be illustrative precisely of the complexity and diversity of the processes and products of evolution. Despite the immense diversity of matters on which he wrote there was, underneath, a unifying theme: that the complexity of the living world cannot be treated as a manifestation of some grand general principle, but that each case must be understood by examining it from the ground up and as the realization of one out of many material paths of causation."
- Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins , "Stephen Jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?" (obituary), Monthly Review, reprinted in Oliver Sacks , ed., The Best American Science Writing 2003, p. 247
|
|
