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Quotes from Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes — Stephen Jay Gould

1941–2002 United States

← All quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

5 quotes

The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the “liberal” rhetoric of “equal time.” But mistake it not.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

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.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stephen Jay Gould (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.