Stephen Jay Gould vs. Rowan Atkinson

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

"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…"

"I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary t…"

"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 …"

"Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search f…"

"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 have long recognized the theory and aesthetic of such comprehensive display: show everything and incite wonder by sheer variety. But I had never realized h…"

"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 …"

"We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for …"

"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…"

"great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for pene…"

"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…"