Gould, Stephen Jay Filmography

• Evolution (2002)
• Life Beyond Earth (1998)
• The Sterilization of Leilani Muir (1996)
• Een schitterend ongeluk (1993)

Famous quotes by Stephen Jay Gould:

"The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations."

"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."

"We pass through this world but once."

"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."

"The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning"

"When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty."

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

"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."

"Facts do not 'speak for themselves', they are read in the light of theory"

"With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot."

"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."

"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."

"I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them."

"All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation."

"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."

"What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality."

"Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning."

"I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal."

"Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious."