Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. W. W. Norton & Company, 1977.
Politicians, like many other people, often confuse correlation with causality as few have studied or understand the mathematics of probability.
While this was certainly true in Ancient times, modernity has given us Public Health and other techniques that now enable us to prevent accidents. Automobile safety from seat belts and air bags are good examples. From a political point of view, however, accidents can and often do control the political landscape as in the unexpected death of a national leader. Often natural disasters are included in the general term “accidents” where the meaning is taken as that which is beyond human control.
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.
