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.

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

A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.

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

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

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?

... 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 ...

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.

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

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

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

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

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

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

The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. It in fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield exactly what we see in the fossil record. It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.