Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who believe that every word in the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean.
Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. W. W. Norton & Company, 1983, p. 253.
Conflict between religion and evolution does not exist in most churches. There are exceptions of some orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. However, in this case the highest prelate of the American Episcopal Church not only sees no conflict but urges that evolution be taught in schools.
The Bible contains two separate and somewhat contradictory versions of creation (Adam & Eve vs. the 6 day creation).
This quotation is noteworthy because although there are some scientists who are sympathetic to the religious fundamentalist view of the origin of the universe, they are almost always second class scientists. In this case, the scientist is a first class scientist, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. So his quotation has more weight than of most others and is used more often by many fundamentalists who support the Biblical Genesis version of creation rather than the Big Bang scientific explanations and evolution. There are however many great scientists who also are people of faith in a God. They may be religious, but like most religious Americans, interpret the Bible metaphorically and symbolically rather than literally as the fundamentalists do.
The Science Guy
This quotation is significant for several reasons. The 3 time candidate for President not only railed against anything having to do with evolution, but in this same year, participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. In this case, he attacked anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn who had hypothesized that a fossilized tooth he had found might have come from a humanoid predecessor of Homo Sapiens. Bryan of course ignored the even then overwhelming evidence of evolution as a mechanism. He was actually right in criticizing Osborn in this case although Bryan had no real evidence for it. Two years later, Osborn published a retraction and correction indicating that better tools and methods of analysis indicated that the tooth was from a primitive species of pig and not of a pre human.
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, where he divided his time teaching there and at Harvard.
