Latest Stephen Jay Gould Quotes from Interviews

• How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like Galileo. Universities or governments have become patrons only in the last few generations. Many of the great scientists of the past were in debt to their patrons in the same sense that modern scientists are influenced by what their granting agencies want.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Past, Lucky, Get Money

  Fuente: www.motherjones.com

• It's true that the level of scientific knowledge among adults is very low, but that's not because there isn't a natural interest. I think most kids are fascinated by the natural world. I've often said that if you could quantify the mental power involved in all the dinosaur names correctly known and correctly spelled by 5-year-old kids in America, you could move any mountain on earth.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Moving, Kids, Thinking

  Fuente: www.motherjones.com

• People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Moving, People, House

  Entrevista con Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. Enero/febrero de 1997.

• El principio de selección natural de Darwin lleva a la predicción de que la forma adecuada de analizar cualquier desarrollo evolutivo es ver las nuevas características como adaptativas a los entornos. Y ése es un principio perfectamente válido. El problema es que hay muchos biólogos evolutivos que consideran que todo lo que ocurre en la evolución evoluciona directamente para obtener un beneficio adaptativo. Y eso simplemente no funciona. Siempre que se construye una estructura por razones adaptativas, la estructura va a mostrar propiedades que no tienen nada que ver con la adaptación. Son sólo consecuencias secundarias.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Evolución, Problema, Entorno

  Entrevista con Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. Enero/febrero de 1997.

• Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Latin, Book, Italian

  Entrevista con Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. Enero/febrero de 1997.

• La selección natural no es más que tres factores: sobreproducción, variación y herencia, combinados para producir la adaptación a entornos locales cambiantes. No es un principio ni un progreso; es sólo un principio de adaptación local. No se hacen criaturas mejores en ningún sentido cósmico; se hacen criaturas que se adaptan mejor a los climas cambiantes de sus hábitats locales.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Climate, Principles

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Si se juntan tres hechos -que todos los organismos producen más descendencia que puede sobrevivir, que hay variación entre los organismos y que al menos parte de esa variación se hereda-, la inferencia silogística es la selección natural.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Together, Three, Variation

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  People, Needs, Looks

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Mean, Essence, Answers

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Science can't tell us what our life means ethically. It can't tell us what we are meant to do as moral creatures. But, insofar as science can understand what we're made of, and what we're related to, the Darwinian revolution completely revised our ideas about who we are and what we're related to and how long we've been here and why we're on this Earth.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Medio, Ideas, Largo

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

También te puede gustar:

Niles Eldredge

Richard Dawkins

Richard Lewontin

Ernst Mayr

Charles Darwin

Simon Conway Morris

Oliver Sacks