Stephen Gould Quotes (9 Quotes)

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.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves', they are read in the light of theory

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.

They have this absurd notion that something that occurs in the past and that is not subject to direct observation is not provable. That's nonsense .... There is a mystery as to how evolution occurs, but there is not a whole lot of doubt as to whether it occurs.

American history without Lincoln.

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

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

Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number

Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured - never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.