In honor of what would have been paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's 65th birthday, here are a few of the many quotes I've pulled from his writing over the years.

[The history of life on earth] includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature.

Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geological second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.

[...] Such a view of life's history is highly contrary both to conventional deterministic models of Western science and to the deepest social traditions and psychological hopes of Western culture for a history culminating in humans as life's highest expression and intended planetary steward.

"The Evolution of Life on Earth" in
Scientific American (10/94)

What are the real success stories of mammalian evolution? We can answer this question without ambiguity, at least in terms of numerous species and vigorous radiation: rats, bats, and antelopes ... These three groups dominate the world of mammals, both in numbers, and in ecological spread.

Full House (1996)

Nothing displays human hubris more than the old textbook designation of recent geological times as the "age of man." First of all, if we must use an eponymous designation, we live today, and have always lived, in the "age of bacteria." Second, if we insist on multicellular parochialism, modern times must surely be called the "age of insects." Homo sapiens is one species, mammals a few thousand. By contrast, nearly a million species of insects have been described (and several million more remain undiscovered and uncataloged). Insects represent more than 70 percent of all named species.

"In the Mind of the Beholder" in
Natural History (2/94)

The intellectual world is littered with systems that pushed consistency to the ends of the earth and the bounds of rationality, but then stepped aside and made an exception for human uniqueness.

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

An abstract, intellectual understanding of deep time comes easily enough - I know how many zeros to place after the 10 when I mean billions. Getting it into the gut is another matter. Deep time is so alien that we can really only comprehend it as metaphor. And so we do in our pedagogy. We tout the geological mile (with human history occupying the last few inches); or the cosmic calendar (with Homo sapiens appearing for but a few moments before Auld Lang Syne). [...] John McPhee has provided the most striking metaphor of all [in Basin and Range]: Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987)

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 human intellectual tradition.

London Independent (1/24/90)

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).

"Capturing the Center" in
Natural History (12/98)

Scientists reach conclusions for the damnedest of reasons: intuitions, guesses, redirections after wild goose chases, all combined with a dollop of rigorous observation and logical reasoning [...] The myth of a separate mode [of scientific thought] based on rigorous objectivity and arcane, largely mathematical knowledge, vouchsafed only to the initiated, may provide some immediate benefits in bamboozling the public to regard [scientists] as a new priesthood, but must ultimately prove harmful in erecting barriers to truly friendly understanding and in falsely persuading so many students that science lies beyond their capabilities.

"In the Mind of the Beholder" in
Natural History (2/94)

Some fashions (tongue piercings, perhaps?) flower once and then disappear, hopefully forever. Others swing in and out of style, as if fastened to the end of a pendulum. Two foibles of human life strongly promote this oscillatory mode. First, our need to create order in a complex world begets our worst mental habit: dichotomy, or our tendency to reduce an intricate set of subtle shadings to a choice between two diametrically opposed alternatives (each with moral weight and therefore ripe for bombast and pontification, if not outright warfare): religion versus science, liberal versus conservative, plain versus fancy, Roll Over Beethoven versus the Moonlight Sonata. Second, many deep questions about our livelihoods, and the fates of nations, truly have no answers - so we cycle the presumed alternatives of our dichotomies, one after the other, always hoping that, this time, we will find the nonexistent key.

Among oscillating fashions governed primarily by the swing of our social pendulum, no issue could be more prominent for an evolutionary biologist, or more central to a broad range of political questions, then genetic versus environmental sources of human abilities and behaviors. The issue has been falsely dichotimized for so many centuries that English even features a mellifluous linguistic contrast for the supposed alternatives: nature versus nurture.

As any thoughtful person understands, the framing of this question as an either-or dichotomy verges on the nonsensical. Both inheritance and upbringing matter in crucial ways. Moreover, an adult human being, built by interaction of these (and other) factors, cannot be disaggregated into separate components with attached percentages. It behooves us all to grasp why such common claims as "intelligence is 30 percent genetic and 70 percent environmental" have no sensible meaning at all and represent the same kind of error as the contention that all overt properties of water may be revealed by noting an underlying construction from two parts of one gas mixed with one part of another.

Nonetheless, a preference for either nature or nurture swings back and forth into fashion as political winds blow and as scientific breakthroughs grant transient prominence to one or another feature in a spectrum of vital influences.

"This View of Life: Dolly's Fashion and Louis's Passion"
Natural History magazine (6/97)

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

Questioning the Millennium (1997)