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Stephen Jay Gould Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation, which led many authors to call him "America's unofficial evolutionist laureate." He spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History. Early in his career he developed with Niles Eldredge the theory of punctuated equilibrium, where evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly to comparatively longer periods of evolutionary stability. According to Gould, punctuated equilibrium overthrew a key pillar of neo-Darwinism. Some evolutionary biologists have argued that the theory was an important insight, but merely modified neo-Darwinism in a manner which was fully compatible with what had been known before. Gould is perhaps best known for his book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), his massive opus which begs a new look at natural selection with the full weight of history behind it. Gould's other books include Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1990), Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History (1992), Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1992), The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1992), Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1994), The Mismeasure of Man (1996), Full House : The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (1997), The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth (2001), Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (2002), I Have Landed : The End of a Beginning in Natural History (2003), and The Hedgehog, The Fox, and The Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities (2004).
Related Links • Excerpts
from Gould Lectures at Stanford University
Stephen Jay Gould Quotes Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question. The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. 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. Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival. No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. 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. The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations. We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
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