Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Environments without oxygen are excellent for the preservation of soft parts: no oxidation, no decay by aerobic bacteria. Such conditions are common on earth, particularly in stagnant basins. But the very conditions that promote preservation also decree that few organisms, if any, make their natural home in such places.

We do not usually surrender the intellectual system of a lifetime for one bit of information that does not fit.

A project like the Burgess revision has potentially flashy and predictably less noticeable aspects. Both are necessary. A conventional reporter will convey only the hot ideas and the startling facts — Hallucigenia gets ink, the Burgess trilobites get ignored.

But the Burgess oddballs mean little in isolation. When placed in an entire fauna, filled with conventional elements as well, they suggest a new view of life. The conventional creatures must be documented with just as much love, and just as assiduously — for they are every bit as important to the total picture.

I suggest that the true Darwinian spirit might salvage our depleted world by denying a favorite theme of Western arrogance — that we are meant to have control and dominion over the earth and its life because we are the loftiest product of a preordained process.

Wonder and knowledge are both to be cherished.

Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape.

Algunas transformaciones son manifiestas y heroicas; otras son tranquilas y sin acontecimientos notables en su devenir, pero no menos importantes en su resultado.