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Stephen Jay Gould Zitate
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Stephen Jay Gould war ein US-amerikanischer Paläontologe, Geologe und Evolutionsbiologe.

✵ 10. September 1941 – 20. Mai 2002
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Stephen Jay Gould Zitate und Sprüche

„Lernen ist oftmals einfach, weil der menschliche Geist wie ein Schwamm von erstaunlichem Aufnahmevermögen und großer Saugkraft funktioniert – jedenfalls dann, wenn seine Poren durch richtige Ausbildung und Motivation offen gehalten wurden.“

Stephen Jay Gould

Die Lügensteine von Marrakesch, Frankfurt am Main, 2006. ISBN 3596157870; Übersetzung: Sebastian Vogel

Über Bildung , Lernen , Motivation

Stephen Jay Gould: Zitate auf Englisch

“Time's arrow of “just history” marks each moment of time with a distinctive brand. But we cannot, in our quest to understand history, be satisfied only with a mark to recognize each moment and a guide to order events in temporal sequence. Uniqueness is the essence of history, but we also crave some underlying generality, some principles of order transcending the distinction of moments—lest we be driven mad by Borges's vision of a new picture every two thousand pages in a book without end. We also need, in short, the immanence of time's cycle.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Quelle: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 196

“Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact—which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!”

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Stephen Jay Gould

After the McLean v. Arkansas creationism trial, as quoted in Review of the National Center for Science Education Vol. 24, No. 6 (November–December 2004) http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol24/620_then_a_miracle_occurs_12_30_1899.asp

“If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Quelle: Full House (1996), p. 47

“The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects—in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. We vilify and curse them for their damnable intransigence. They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Wonderful Life

Quelle: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 52

“The giraffe's neck supposedly supplies a crucial example for preferring natural selection over Lamarckism as a cause of evolution. But Darwin himself (however wrongly by later judgement) did not deny the Lamarckian principle of inheritance for characters acquired by use or lost by disuse. He regarded the Lamarckian mechanism as weak, infrequent, and entirely subsidiary to natural selection, but he accepted the validity of evolution by use and disuse. Darwin does speculate about the adaptive advantage of giraffe's necks, but he cites both natural selection and Lamarckism as probable causes of elongation.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 312
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“[C]ontingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Wonderful Life

Quelle: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 51

“Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection… Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 328
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Phenomena unfold on their own appropriate scales of space and time and may be invisible in our myopic world of dimensions assessed by comparison with human height and times metered by human lifespans. So much of accumulating importance at earthly scales […] is invisible by the measuring rod of a human life. So much that matters to particles in the microscopic world of molecules […] either averages out to stability at our scale or simply stands below our limits of perception.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

"The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis", pp. 41–42
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius, in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet's Madness.)”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 304
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“In France, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire attempted to portray the skeleton of vertebrates as a set of modifications upon an archetypal vertebra. In the 1820's, Geoffroy extended his ambitious plan to include annelids and arthropods under that same rubric. …Vertebrates support their soft parts with an internal skeleton, but insects must live within their vertebrae (a reality, not a metaphor, for Geoffroy). This comparison led to… the claim that a vertebrate rib must represent the same organ as an arthropod leg - and that insects must therefore walk on their own ribs!”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 326
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“The argument of the “long view” may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children's children's children—hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier", p. 365
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“Each and every loss becomes an instance of ultimate tragedy—something that once was, but shall never be known to us. The hump of the giant deer—as a nonfossilizable item of soft anatomy—should have fallen into the maw of erased history. But our ancestors provided a wondrous rescue, and we should rejoice mightily. Every new item can instruct us; every unexpected object possesses beauty for its own sake; every rescue from history's great shredding machine is—and I don't know how else to say this—a holy act of salvation for a bit of totality.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"A Lesson from the Old Masters", p. 195
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me […]. Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered, throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in an occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held great secular power during much of Western history. When my folks held such sway, more briefly and in Old Testament times, we committed similar atrocities with the same rationales.)”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Non-Overlapping Magisteria", p. 281
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into “traits,” explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating “for” the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Our Natural Place", p. 243
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead “mildly guilty now and then” to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Dinosaur in a Haystack

"The Razumovsky Duet", p. 270
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

“Non vi è peggior schiavitù di quella che s'ignora.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Dinosaur in a Haystack

"Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", p. 246.
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

“I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch An Urchin in the Storm

"How Does a Panda Fit?", p. 21
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“[T]ruly grand and powerful theories […] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. […] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly.
"Mr. Sophia's Pony", p. 155
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just as mightily in the service of wonder—and the two elements are complementary, not independent or opposed. The thought fills me with awe—a mechanical contraption that could fit in the back of a pickup truck, traveling through space for twelve years, dodging around four giant bodies and their associated moons, and finally sending exquisite photos across more than four light-hours of space from the farthest planet in our solar system.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"The Horn of Triton", pp. 508–509
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“Unfortunately, all life on earth - the only life we know - represents, for all its current variety, the results of a single experiment, for every earthly species evolved from the common ancestry of a single origin. We desperately need a repetition of the experiment (several would be better, but let's not be greedy!) in order to make a judgement. Mars represents our first real hope for a second experiment - the sine qua non”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

for any proper answer for the question of questions.
"War of the Worldviews", p. 353
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

"Eight Little Piggies", p. 77
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults—and I come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.
"The Dinosaur Rip-off", pp. 101–102
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Quelle: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998) Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 355

“Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"Literary bias on the slippery slope", p. 249
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch An Urchin in the Storm

Preface, p. 9
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of “popular” writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as “conjecture and refutation.””

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Stephen Jay Gould

"An Essay on a Pig Roast", p. 437
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“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.””

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

But mistake it not.
"A Visit to Dayton", p. 276
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. […] A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch The Flamingo's Smile

"Only His Wings Remained", p. 54
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

“The story of a theory's failure often strikes readers as sad and unsatisfying. Since science thrives on self-correction, we who practice this most challenging of human arts do not share such a feeling. We may be unhappy if a favored hypothesis loses or chagrined if theories that we proposed prove inadequate. But refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment, even when […] no new and comprehensive theory has yet filled the void.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"The Face of Miranda", p. 496
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

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