Stephen Jay Gould Quotes about Evolution

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

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.

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.

Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade — a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.