All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative fr…

Stephen Jay Gould
123 citations
All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned. ✨ Stephen Jay Gould (1990). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, p.136, W. W. Norton & Company
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The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary. ✨ Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of Histor … ▶
World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. ✨ Stephen Jay Gould (1993). Eight little piggies: reflectio … ▶
... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documente … ▶
We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. ✨ Stephen Jay Gould (1995). Dinosaur in a haysta … ▶

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