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Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Stephen Jay Gould quotes about humanity

American Scientist September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002

Stephen Jay Gould quotes in french
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Quotes

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on... Stephen Jay Gould
I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano. Stephen Jay Gould
There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus. Stephen Jay Gould
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it. Stephen Jay Gould
If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing. Stephen Jay Gould
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along. Stephen Jay Gould
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition. Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould quote: "Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information;..."
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity. Stephen Jay Gould
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. Stephen Jay Gould
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. Stephen Jay Gould

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