Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Consciousness

• Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Pathways, Events, Alternatives

• Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Morning, Long, Ignorant

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.305, W. W. Norton & Company

• Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Men, Track, Heaven

• 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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Animal, Doubt, Machines

• I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident [...] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Meaningful, Lying, Believe

• Me gusta resumir lo que considero los mensajes de la revolución de Darwin que rompen pedestales en la siguiente afirmación, que podría cantarse varias veces al día, como un mantra Hare Krishna, para fomentar la penetración en el alma: Los seres humanos no son el resultado final de un progreso evolutivo predecible, sino más bien una ocurrencia cósmica fortuita, una ramita diminuta en el arbusto enormemente arborescente de la vida, que, si se replantara a partir de una semilla, es casi seguro que no volvería a crecer esta ramita, o tal vez ninguna ramita con alguna propiedad que quisiéramos llamar conciencia.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Soul, Progress, Pedestal

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327, 1995.

• Since the universe must contain millions of appropriate planets, consciousness in some form - but not with the paired eyes and limbs, and the brain built of neurons in the only example we know - may evolve frequently. But if only one origin of life in a million ever leads to consciousness, then Martian bacteria most emphatically do not imply Little Green Men.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Eye, Men, Origin Of Life

  Stephen Jay Gould (1999). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Three Rivers Press (CA)

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