Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

"Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors - from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call "free will," determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum - extreme altruism to extreme selfishness - that our genes permit."

La nueva interpretación de la fauna de Burguess Shale es una de las transformaciones más invisibles por dos razones básicas, pero su capacidad para modificar nuestra concepción de la vida no puede ser igualada por ningún otro descubrimiento paleontológico.

This is a changing world. It changes from day to day, year to year, and from age to age. Rivers deepen their gorges as they carry more land to the sea. Mountains rise, only to be leveled gradually by winds and rain. Continents rise and sink into the sea. Such are the gradual changes of the physical earth as days add into years and years combine to become ages.

. . . the great British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth (wonderful name for an insect man, I always thought) . . .

Seek with enough conviction aforethought and ye shall find.

This or that is proclaimed awesome every second sentence - and we have lost a wonderful English word.

I have spent the last week as a nearly full-time reader of platypusology.

The nematode enters the insect's mouth, anus, or spiracle and migrates into the hemocoel. There the nematode injects millions of bacterial symbionts from its own intestine into the insect's circulatory system. These bacteria, though harmless to the nematode, kill the insect within hours.

¿Por qué el origen de la vida pluricelular se dio en forma de un corto pulso a través de tres faunas radicalmente diferentes , y no como un aumento lento y continuo de complejidad? La historia de la vida es infinitamente fascinante, infinitamente curiosa, pero ciertamente no es la sustancia de nuestros pensamientos y esperanzas usuales.

"International Socialist Review Issue 24, July–August 2002
Stephen Jay Gould: Dialectical Biologist by Phil Gasper

Every major newspaper carried an obituary of Gould after his death, praising his scientific accomplishments. But most said nothing about another important aspect of Gould’s life–his radical politics. Gould was a red diaper baby. His maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants who worked in Manhattan’s garment sweatshops in the early years of the last century, just blocks from the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 workers in 1911. "I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrant garment workers," Gould wrote, "and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning)…set their views and helped to define their futures."4 Gould’s parents were New York leftists, probably in or around the Communist Party in the 1930s, and he once boasted that he had learned his Marxism "literally at [my] daddy’s knee.

El mundo está repleto de señales que no percibimos. Las criaturas diminutas viven en un mundo diferente de fuerzas poco familiares. Muchos animales “de nuestra escala exceden en mucho el alcance de nuestra percepción de sensaciones familiares. Los murciélagos esquivan los obstáculos haciendo rebotar en ellos ondas sonoras de frecuencia que yo no alcanzo a oír, aunque algunas personas sí pueden hacerlo. Muchos insectos ven el ultravioleta y siguen las invisibles «guías» del néctar de las flores hasta lo que para ellos es una fuente de alimentos y de polen que acarrearán hasta la siguiente flor para su fecundación (las flores crean estas trazas orientadoras de color en su propio beneficio, no en el de los insectos).
¡Qué seres tan poco perceptivos somos! Rodeados de tantas cosas fascinantes y reales que no vemos (oímos, olemos, tocamos, saboreamos) en la naturaleza, y, no obstante, tan crédulos y predispuestos a la aceptación de nuevos poderes que confundimos los trucos de magos mediocres con percepciones de un mundo psíquico más allá del nuestro. Lo paranormal puede ser una fantasía; desde luego es un refugio para muchos charlatanes. Pero los poderes de percepción «parahumana» están a nuestro alrededor en las aves, las abejas y las bacterias.

The fossils were sublime, but I found as much fascination in the odd paraphernalia of culture that, for various reasons, end up in museum drawers. Late eighteenth century apothecary boxes, thread cases from the mills of Lawrence, Victorian cigar boxes of gaudy Cuban design - all the better to house fossils.

Single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away.

History is also a hard taskmaster, for she covers her paths by erasing so much evidence from her records —

As a chief ingredient in the mythology of science, the accumulation of objective facts supposedly controls the history of conceptual change–as logical and self-effacing scientists bow before the dictates of nature and willingly change their views to accommodate the growth of conceptual knowledge. The paradigm for such an idealistic notion remains Huxley’s famous remark about “a beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.” But single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away (and properly so, for the majority of deeply anomalous observations turn out to be wrong)...

Anomalous facts get incorporated into existing theories, often with a bit of forced stretching to be sure, but usually with decent fit because most worldviews contain considerable flexibility. (How else could they last so long, or be so recalcitrant to overthrow?)