Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
- Stephen Jay Gould
More Quotes By Stephen Jay Gould
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend... Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s... When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are... Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s... The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary... We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and... The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from... Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint... Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its... Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a... Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation ‘gathers in’ and guards evolutionary change by locking and... Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them... If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record...
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