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Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10 14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира Крупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современностиКрупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современности
Stephen Gould

If we make this readjustment t...

If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

I am willing to believe that m...

I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident [...] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

South America had been an isla...

South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American... are all recent migrants from North America.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

[In natural history,] great di...

[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

I view the major features of m...

I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [...] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Perhaps randomness is not mere...

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.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Our world is not an optimal pl...

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.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

I would trade all the advantag...

I would trade all the advantages of humanity to be a fly on the wall when Franklin and Jefferson discussed liberty, Lenin and Trotsky revolution, Newton and Halley the shape of the universe, or when Darwin entertained Huxley and Lyell at Down.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

I picture several reviewers of...

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

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

As a word, ecology has been so...

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Memory is a fascinating tricks...

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

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Most impediments to scientific...

Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. ( Aristotle , and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Contingency is rich and fascin...

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.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

The truly awesome intellectual...

The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries have various fates: Most burn or unravel in the footsteps of time and the fires of later discovery. But their glory lies in their integrity as unified structures of great complexity and broad implication.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Each worldview was a cultural ...

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Iconography becomes even more ...

Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite 'thing' cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw 'evolution' or 'social organization,' not to mention the more mundane 'digestion' or 'self-interest,' without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

If a man dies of cancer in fea...

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.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

Few intellectual tyrannies can...

Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

When we look to presumed sourc...

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.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes
Stephen Gould

A rare book at once of great i...

A rare book at once of great importance and wonderful to read.... Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology , recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.... A major addition to the scientific literature.

Stephen Gould 276 quotes

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