The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Lucian Velea
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Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Lucian Velea
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We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Lucian Velea
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In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Lucian Velea
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In science, ""fact"" can only mean ""confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."" I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Lucian Velea
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Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Lucian Velea
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We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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