Frases de Stephen Jay Gould
0 0Stephen Jay Gould
Data de nascimento: 10. Setembro 1941
Data de falecimento: 20. Maio 2002
Stephen Jay Gould foi um paleontólogo e biólogo evolucionista dos Estados Unidos. Foi também um autor importante no que diz respeito à história da ciência. É reconhecido como o mais lido e conhecido divulgador científico da sua geração.[carece de fontes?]
Nascido numa família judia, não praticou nenhuma religião organizada. Ainda que tenha sido educado num meio ideologicamente marcado pelo socialismo, nunca assumiu qualquer militância política. Como escritor, lutou contra a opressão cultural, principalmente contra a pseudociência legitimadora do racismo.[carece de fontes?]
Começou a leccionar como membro da faculdade da Universidade de Harvard, em 1967, onde se tornou professor na cadeira de Alexander Agassiz, de zoologia. Ajudou Niles Eldredge a desenvolver a teoria do equilíbrio pontuado , segundo a qual as mudanças evolucionárias ocorreriam de forma acelerada em períodos relativamente curtos, em populações isoladas, intercalados de períodos mais longos, caracterizados pela estabilidade evolutiva.[carece de fontes?]
Na perspectiva do próprio Gould, esta teoria derrubava um princípio-chave do neodarwinismo - perspectiva não partilhada por grande parte da comunidade dos biólogos evolucionários que a consideram apenas como uma rectificação importante, sem dúvida, mas que não punha em causa o que já era conhecido e defendido como certo pelos cientistas até ao momento.[carece de fontes?]
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Citações Stephen Jay Gould
„I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.“
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb
"Wide hats and narrow minds" https://books.google.com/books?id=-lWtVSZoqWkC&pg=PA776 New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151 https://books.google.com/books?id=z0XY7Rg_lOwC&pg=PA151.
„We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.“
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History
„When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.“
— Stephen Jay Gould, An Urchin in the Storm
An Urchin in the Storm (1987), Context: [A]s we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
"The Quack Detector", p. 245
„This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.“
— Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998), "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 329
„Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote: “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.” Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that “irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”“
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb
The Panda's Thumb (1980), "Bathybius and Eozoon", pp. 243–244
„But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the “stuff” of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any “objective” basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?“
— Stephen Jay Gould
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (Harmony, 2003), p. 82
„I am not unmindful of the journalist's quip that yesterday's paper wraps today's garbage. I am also not unmindful of the outrages visited upon our forests to publish redundant and incoherent collections of essays; for, like Dr. Seuss' Lorax, I like to think that I speak for the trees. Beyond vanity, my only excuses for a collection of these essays lie in the observation that many people like (and as many people despise) them, and that they seem to cohere about a common theme—Darwin's evolutionary perspective as an antidote to our cosmic arrogance.“
— Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin
Ever Since Darwin (1977), Prologue, p. 14
„We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for humorous or sarcastic effect, the intended meaning of a word becomes directly opposite to the usual sense…“
— Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998), "The Tallest Tale", p. 313
„Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually turned over to become the first vertebrates (for the classical statement of the inversion theory, see William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, 1920).“
— Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998), "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
