124 quotes
Nature has no automatically transferable wisdom to serve as the basis of human morality. Passive observation and unquestioned reverence for nature are no substitute for ethical philosophy.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002)
Few campaigns are more dangerous than emotional calls for proscription rather than thought.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.
Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs.
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.
Eight Little Piggies (1993)
People under assault, and hopelessly overmatched, often do the opposite of what propriety might suggest: they dig in when they ought to accommodate. We call this behavior “siege mentality.”
Full House (1996)
When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
The world is a complex place. In our struggles to simplify and understand, we often identify some bugbear and then make it responsible for all evils.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
No serious student of human behavior denies the potent influence of evolved biology upon our cultural lives. Our struggle is to figure out how biology affects us, not whether it does.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Just as no one is quite so stupid as to nullify biology completely, so too does no one deny some flexibility in the translation of genes into complex behaviors.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.
Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
No one doubts that biological universals exist. We must sleep, eat, and grow older, and we are not about to give up procreation; almost all our social institutions are influenced by these imperatives.
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
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.)
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving.
The Median Isn't the Message (1985)
Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability. (I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)