Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

It is not the strongest of the species that survives. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is the members of the species that are most adaptive to change.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

I'm a Darwinian.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

I think Darwinism as a theory explaining evolution within species is incredibly brilliant - just unbelievably, incredibly brilliant.

We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.