Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.

It's always interesting just to see how the human mind is relating to the natural universe, and what we try to make of it just so we can believe we understand what's going on.

Prediction by analogy -creativity - is so pervasive we normally don't notice it.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.

Our brains are wired to interpret shapes as faces and bodies. That's why people see the Virgin Mary in the clouds or even in cheese sandwiches. It's your cytoplasm, not some strange ectoplasm.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

... in the history of the human mind there has never been a useful thought or a profound truth that has not found its century and admirers.

Usually as humans and especially as a man, we look at things in context. It's like, oh, I know what that is, that's this, or this, there's that.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

I love humans; always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

Liberals live in a cocoon, and the shelter of the cocoon is lie after lie as after lie after lie that gives them comfort. They are comfortable in these misrepresentations, distortions, and mistakes about their opponents. It's one of the ways in which they feel valid and relevant is to think that all the rest of us who disagree with them are contemptible and mean and all that, and we're not worth understanding or getting to know.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

Humans find meaningfulness where none exists because we want to create a sense of order in this chaotic universe. It's called apophenia. (And it's also the reason people believe in God.)

...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.