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Stephen Jay Gould Quotes about Reality

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Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite thing cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw evolution or social

Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.

Stephen Jay Gould
Reality, Self, Organization
Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.428, W. W. Norton & Company

Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [...] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.

Stephen Jay Gould
Struggle, Reality, Worry
Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

Stephen Jay Gould
Reality, Ignorant, Mind
"I Have Landed". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48, May 14, 2002.

Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).

Stephen Jay Gould
Latin, Reality, Bonus
Stephen Jay Gould (2002). “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”, p.1070, Harvard University Press

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