Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton & Company, 1981.
Science has the interesting characteristic that most failures are successes in the sense that scientific knowledge is gained from the failure even if it only a guide to what not to do in the future. Politics would be well served to adopt this pragmatic approach, but ideology usually prevails in politics and errors tend to be repeated if there are supported by political philosophy or ideology.
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.
