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Other authors named Stephen:
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. |
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Vote: | Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. |
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Vote: | In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. |
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Vote: | Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival. |
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Vote: | No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. |
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Vote: | Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. |
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Vote: | The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science-or of any honest intellectual inquiry. |
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Vote: | The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis. |
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Vote: | The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | We pass through this world but once. |
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Vote: | When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. |
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Biography
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Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was a New York-born American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was the most influential and widely read writer of popular science of his generation. Born Jewish, he did not formally practice any organized religion, and though he was raised in a socialist home he did not become an active socialist himself. He spoke out against what he saw as cultural oppression in all its forms, especially alleged pseudoscience in the service of racism.
He served as a member of the faculty at Harvard beginning in 1967, after obtaining his PhD at Columbia. Toward the end of his life he served as the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at that university. He helped Niles Eldredge develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium 1972, wherein evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly in comparatively brief periods of environmental stress, separated by longer periods of evolutionary stability. According to Gould, this overthrew a key tenet of neo-Darwinism; according to most evolutionary biologists, the theory was an important insight but merely modified neo-Darwinism in a way fully compatible with what had been known before. He was married twice and had two children.
Gould as a public figure
Gould became widely known through his popular science essays in Natural History magazine, collections of essays like The Panda's Thumb and The Flamingo's Smile, and extended studies like Wonderful Life and others.
Gould was an emphatic advocate of evolutionary theory and wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary theory to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of evolutionary (and pre-evolutionary) thinking. His early research involved the study of the fossil record of snails (detailed in one of his essays). He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport (including an entire essay) and a very wide range of other topics.
Although a neo-Darwinist, his emphasis was less gradualist and reductionist than most neo-Darwinists, and he opposed sociobiology. He spent much of his time fighting against creationism and what he regarded as other forms of pseudoscience. Gould used the term Non Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) to describe how, in his view, science and religion could not comment on each other's realm.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stephen Jay Gould".
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