We pass through this world but once. — Stephen Jay Gould

Sure we fit. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. But the world wasn’t made for us and it will endure without us. — Stephen Jay Gould

The world is full of signals that we don’t perceive. — Stephen Jay Gould

The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. — Stephen Jay Gould

The board transported its jurisdiction to a never–never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: ‘They still call it Kansas, but I don’t think we’re in the real world anymore. — Stephen Jay Gould

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. — Stephen Jay Gould

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change. — Stephen Jay Gould

Nature is what she is–amoral and persistent. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. — Stephen Jay Gould

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent. — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences. — Stephen Jay Gould

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science. — Stephen Jay Gould

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence. — 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

Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn’t science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted. — Stephen Jay Gould

I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized. — Stephen Jay Gould

Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest. — Stephen Jay Gould

So much of science proceeds by telling stories. — Stephen Jay Gould

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not ‘organized common sense’; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information. — Stephen Jay Gould

Theory–free science makes about as much sense as value–free politics. — Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors. — Stephen Jay Gould

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction. — Stephen Jay Gould

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness. — Stephen Jay Gould

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria. — Stephen Jay Gould

With copious evidence ranging from Plato’s haughtiness to Beethoven’s tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot. — Stephen Jay Gould

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey’s ideas about anatomical unity. — Stephen Jay Gould

The causes of life’s history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life’s meaning. — Stephen Jay Gould

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology. — Stephen Jay Gould

The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought. — Stephen Jay Gould

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities. — Stephen Jay Gould

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history. — Stephen Jay Gould

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. — Stephen Jay Gould

Each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell. — Stephen Jay Gould

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. — Stephen Jay Gould

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations. — Stephen Jay Gould

Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution? — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion. — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. — Stephen Jay Gould

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. — Stephen Jay Gould

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth. — Stephen Jay Gould

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident. — Stephen Jay Gould

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it’s what we’re made of, it’s what our life means insofar as science can answer that question. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress. — Stephen Jay Gould

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans. — Stephen Jay Gould

Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. — Stephen Jay Gould

Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense–only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple. — Stephen Jay Gould

Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning. — Stephen Jay Gould

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. — Stephen Jay Gould

The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the ‘liberal’ rhetoric of ‘equal time.’ But mistake it not. — Stephen Jay Gould

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied. — Stephen Jay Gould

At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation. — Stephen Jay Gould

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. — Stephen Jay Gould

Duke est desipere in loco [it is pleasant to act foolishly from time to time–a line from Horace]. — Stephen Jay Gould

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time. — Stephen Jay Gould

Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel. — Stephen Jay Gould