395 Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Rifkin's assertions bear no relationship to what I have observed and practiced for 25 years ... Either I am blind or he is wrong - and I think I can show, by analyzing his slipshod scholarship and basic misunderstanding of science, that his world is an invention constructed to validate his own private hopes ... Rifkin shows no understanding of the norms and procedures of science: he displays little comprehension of what science is and how scientists work.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.