Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this [Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'] and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

I think I was probably wondering, having looked at human beings for a long time, wondering if evolution ever took place. And I still have my doubts.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.

The world is as it should be.

All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy when they think it safe to do so.

Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

[Evolution Theory] is the motivating factor for guys like Hitler and Stalin and George Bush, by the way, who is a Satan worshipper, like we don't know that.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

I did some reading to prep for Expelled. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler , and that was a very interesting book - one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin 's theory - supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus - led to the murder of millions of innocent people.

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.

I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme.

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Scientists have long known that Darwinism is false. They have adhered to the myth out of self-interest and a zealous desire to put down God.