395 Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

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.

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.

Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.