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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

“We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information—not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

"A Foot Soldier for Evolution", p. 441
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“Geoffrey also recognized that the opposite orientations of gut and nervous system posed a problem for his claim that insects and vertebrates represent different versions of the same archetypal animal - and he proposed the first account of the inversion theory to resolve this threat to unification. …Geoffroy pursued the… aim of establishing a "unity of type" that could generate both arthropods and vertebrates from the same basic blueprint. …The single grand design includes a gut in the middle and the main nerve cords somewhere on the periphery.”

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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)

“If I could have those sixty seconds within Bradypus… would I not receive a plea for humans to pause, reassess - and above all, slow down?”

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

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 391
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“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.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

Quelle: Eight Little Piggies (1993) "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282

“I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions—and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch The Flamingo's Smile

"Just in the Middle", p. 378
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

“I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch The Panda's Thumb

"Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick", p. 235
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch An Urchin in the Storm

"Deep Time and Ceaseless Motion", p. 98
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.”

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

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 402
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Eugene Dubois is no hero in my book, if only because I share the spirit of his unorthodoxies, but disagree so strongly with his version, and regard his supporting arguments as so weakly construed and so willfully blind to opposing evidence (the dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without).”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

"Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity", p. 136
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch An Urchin in the Storm

"The Ghost of Protagoras", p. 64
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes “for” particular items of anatomy or behavior.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch I Have Landed

"The Without and Within of Smart Mice", p. 234 (originally appeared in Time, 1999-09-13)
I Have Landed (2002)

“Evolution is the conviction that organisms developed their current forms by an extended history of continual transformation, and that ties of genealogy bind all living things into one nexus. Panselectionism is a denial of history, for perfection covers the tracks of time. A perfect wing may have evolved to its current state, but it may have been created just as we find it. We simply cannot tell if perfection be our only evidence. As Darwin himself understood so well, the primary proofs of evolution are oddities and imperfections that must record pathways of historical descent—the panda's thumb and the flamingo's smile of my book titles”

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

chosen to illustrate this paramount principle of history
Quelle: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 84

“Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources—certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. […] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history—and you become an acive agent, not merely a “reporter.””

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

Introduction, p. 6
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more often a rapid transition between stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinction. Species are the units of nature's morphology.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch The Panda's Thumb

"A Quahog is a Quahog", p. 213
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

“True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights—and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks, one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller, usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well—magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?”

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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 went to the movies to see Independence Day, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can't survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.)”

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

"The Dodo in the Caucus Race", p. 232
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck originally evolved for this purpose. The neck may have first lengthened in context of a different use, and then been coopted for better dining when giraffes moved into the open plains. Or the neck may have evolved to perform several functions at once. We cannot learn the reasons for historical origin simply by listing current uses.”

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

"The Tallest Tale", p. 317
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“[S]cientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits […]. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain—as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.”

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

Quelle: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), pp. 6–7

“It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

The Median Isn't the Message (1985)

“Included in this “almost nothing,” as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet—an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being.”

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Stephen Jay Gould

"Literary bias on the slippery slope", p. 252
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly—and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).”

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Stephen Jay Gould

Quelle: Full House (1996), p. 8

“I am not […] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. […] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

"Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies—for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of sycophantic insincerity, praising him as the light of the universe (in hopes, no doubt, for a few ducats to support future work); this old practice makes me feel like such an honest and upright man, by comparison, when I put a positive spin, perhaps ever so slightly exaggerated, on a grant proposal.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Dinosaur in a Haystack

"The Razumovsky Duet", p. 263
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

“Nearly anyone in this line of work would take a bullet for the last pregnant dodo. But should we not admire the person who, when faced with an overwhelmingly sad reality beyond and personal blame or control, strives valiantly to rescue whatever can be salvaged, rather than retreating to the nearest corner to weep or assign fault?”

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

"The Dodo in the Caucus Race", p. 234
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“[S]cience is often regarded as the most objective and truth-directed of human enterprises, and since direct observation is supposed to be the favored route to factuality, many people equate respectable science with visual scrutiny—just the facts ma'am, and palpably before my eyes. But science is a battery of observational and inferential methods, all directed to the testing of propositions that can, in principle, be definitely proven false. […] At all scales, from smallest to largest, quickest to slowest, many well-documented conclusions of science lie beyond the strictly limited domain of direct observation. No one has ever seen an electron or a black hole, the events of a picosecond or a geological eon.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Eight Little Piggies

"Muller Bros. Moving & Storage", pp. 200–201
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.”

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

"Chance Riches", p. 342
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually turned over to become the first vertebrates (for the classical statement of the inversion theory, see William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, 1920).”

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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) "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327

“We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for humorous or sarcastic effect, the intended meaning of a word becomes directly opposite to the usual sense…”

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

"The Tallest Tale", p. 313
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“I am not unmindful of the journalist's quip that yesterday's paper wraps today's garbage. I am also not unmindful of the outrages visited upon our forests to publish redundant and incoherent collections of essays; for, like Dr. Seuss' Lorax, I like to think that I speak for the trees. Beyond vanity, my only excuses for a collection of these essays lie in the observation that many people like (and as many people despise) them, and that they seem to cohere about a common theme—Darwin's evolutionary perspective as an antidote to our cosmic arrogance.”

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Stephen Jay Gould buch Ever Since Darwin

Prologue, p. 14
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

“But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the “stuff” of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any “objective” basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?”

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Stephen Jay Gould

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82

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