Friedrich Nietzsche vs. Stephen Jay Gould

"Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only fro…"

"All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. Bu…"

"Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data . And few intellec…"

"If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would sur…"

"The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic d…"

"He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearm…"

"Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck…"

"In his anti-Darwinian book... , Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanat…"

"Bowing to the reality of harried lives, Rudwick recognizes that not everyone will read every word of the meaty second section; he even explicitly gives us pe…"

"f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only …"

"The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in st…"

"The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. Th…"

"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually tur…"

"I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to …"

"The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive"

"In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms …"

"Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—…"

"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he i…"

"The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environme…"

"But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measur…"