Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist, evolutionary theorist, and author of popular natural history books. Doctorate from Columbia University in 1967; staff of Harvard University. Among his other award-winning books are The Mismeasure of Man, 1981, Wonderful Life, 1989

If nature is nonmoral, then evolution cannot teach any ethical theory at all. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, 1983.

 

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. The Panda's Thumb, 1980

 

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive. Ibid.

 

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geologic clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. Ibid..

 

Species are the units of nature's morphology. Ibid.

 

Destruction and creation are locked in a dialectic of interaction. The Flamingo's Smile, 1985.

 

Even if environments were perfectly constant, evolution would continue as organisms struggle (literally or figuratively) with others in the race for life. Ibid.

 

About 570 million years ago, our modern fossil record began with the greatest of geological bangs - the Cambrian explosion. Ibid.

 

Many of the most famous experiments in animal ethology affirm and extend the principle of modularity. Consider Niko Tinbergen's classic work on begging for food in newly hatched gulls (so beautifully described in his charming book, The Herring Gull's World). The newborns peck vigorously at their parent's beak, apparently aiming for a red spot near the tip of the mandible. If an infant makes proper contact, the parent regurgitates a parcel of food and the baby gets its first meal. Eight Little Piggies, 1993.

 

Great ideas, like species, do not have "eureka" moments of sudden formulation in all their subtle complexity; rather, they ooze into existence along tortuous paths lined with blind alleys . . . Ibid.

 

. . . the cruel dilemma, the Catch-22, of evolution lies in recognizing that a species cannot consciously or actively prepare for future contingencies. A species can only evolve for current benefits and deliver its future fate to the wheel of fortune. Ibid.

 

Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion? Ibid.

 

Freud was right in identifying suppression of human arrogance as the common achievement of great scientific revolutions. Full House, 1996.

 

I will argue that we are still suffering from a legacy as old as Plato, a tendency to abstract a single ideal or average as the "essence" of a system, and to devalue or ignore variation among the individuals that constitute the full population. Ibid.

 

The basic theory of natural selection offers no statement about general progress, and supplies no mechanism whereby overall advance might be expected. Ibid.

 

We live now in the "Age of Bacteria." Our planet has always been in the "Age of Bacteria," ever since the first fossils&emdash;bacteria, of course&emdash;were entombed in rocks more than three and half billion years ago. Ibid.