Stephen Jay Gould Evolution Quotations

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.

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

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

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

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

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

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

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

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

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.

... 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 ...

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?

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

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

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