American - Scientist | September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002
We pass through this world but once.
Stephen Jay Gould
LifeWorldThroughPassOnce
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
ProcessEvolutionExpansionConstant
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
PeopleSeedsToolsLearnPolitical
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
LifeHistoryYouSeeDomination
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
EvolutionProofLiesFoundations
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
ScienceCreativeInformationActing
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.
ConstructionDriveUnderstandingOwn
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
BestThinkKnowNeverQuestionMost
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.
ScienceTimeTomorrowStartPhysics
People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs to them that if they're asking for it and another thousand people are asking, I don't have 1,000 five minutes to give.
TimePeopleMeThinkNeverAsking
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.
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Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
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