Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Tradition

• 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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Intellectual, Culture

  1990 In The Independent, 24 Jan.

• Las historias más erróneas son las que creemos conocer mejor y, por tanto, nunca escrutamos ni cuestionamos.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Ciencia, Pensamiento, Niebla

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). "Full House", p.57, Harvard University Press.

• Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Hope, Science, Comforting

  Stephen Jay Gould (1987). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.401, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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 view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Baseball, Commitment, Views

• Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Self, Vision, Bricks

  "An Urchin in the Storm". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Cardboard Darwinism", p. 27, 1987.

• The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Discovery, Missing, Usual

• 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.

• The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  PlatoFilosofía, Filosofía

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.177, W. W. Norton & Company

• Cuando buscamos un caso de manual para el buen funcionamiento de la ciencia, la corrección de cierto error ofrece muchas más promesas que el establecimiento de una verdad probable. Las corazonadas confirmadas, por supuesto, son más optimistas que las hipótesis desacreditadas. Dado que las peores tradiciones de la escritura "popular" equiparan falsamente la instrucción con la dulzura y la luz, nuestra literatura promocional abunda en insípidos relatos al modo heroico, aunque las duras historias de decepción y pérdida ofrecen una visión más profunda de una metodología que el célebre filósofo Karl Popper etiquetó en su día como "conjetura y refutación".

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Disappointment, Writing, Loss

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, p.437, W. W. Norton & Company

También te puede gustar:

Niles Eldredge

Richard Dawkins

Richard Lewontin

Ernst Mayr

Charles Darwin

Simon Conway Morris

Oliver Sacks