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?]
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, livro 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.
Fonte: The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
„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.“
Fonte: 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, livro An Urchin in the Storm
"The Quack Detector", p. 245
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)
Contexto: [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 silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)“
"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
„Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return.“
"The Panda's Thumb of Technology", p. 65
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)
„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, livro Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
„I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. […] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.“
"Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me", p. 29
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)
„The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor.“
"The Streak of Streaks", pp. 186–187; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1988-08-18)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)
„Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of “traditional values” and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.“
"Good Sports & Bad", p. 325; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)
