Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

How fragile and unpredictable the course of history is.

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary.

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

History is totally unpredictable.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

… history turns out as always to be too messy, contingent and subject to the vagaries of human agency to be slotted into neat boxes.

Historians emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated ... Few principles apply all the time.

Human affairs are governed by such a variety of whimsical circumstances, that we should always be prepared to stand the shock of that disappointment which the best concerted measures are constantly subject to.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

The world has always been uncertain. This is the nature of the world.

We are all just the tip of a pinprick of the millions of things that had to happen in order for us to be here.

The world is unpredictable.

This argument [that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance] comes up repeatedly: its latest manifestation is Hoyle's discussion of the likelihood of a wind blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 [sic]. What is wrong with it? Essentially, it is that no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.