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"[T]rying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all."
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Stephen Jay GouldThe classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature — Stephen Jay Gould
"The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined."
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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biol
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"But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is natures only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions."
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Stephen Jay GouldQuote
"The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it."
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Stephen Jay GouldQuote
"Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut."
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Stephen Jay GouldQuote
"Yesterday’s seer is today’s bore."
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Stephen Jay GouldQuote
"I’m a profound anti-romantic. Romanticism is dangerous. Romanticism untrammeled by intellect gives rise to fascism after all."
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Stephen Jay Gould