Stephen Jay Gould Quotes about Writing

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A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

Stephen Jay Gould

Hate, Writing, Done

The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.

Stephen Jay Gould

Sports, Baseball, Writing

Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.

Stephen Jay Gould

Baseball, Writing, Trying

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Stephen Jay Gould

Writing, Thinking, Wonderful

It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.

Stephen Jay Gould

Writing, Issues, Ethical Questions

"Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Unenchanted Evening", p. 39, 1993.

When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.

Stephen Jay Gould

Disappointment, Writing, Loss

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