Frasi di Stephen Jay Gould

“La maggior parte degli impedimenti alla comprensione scientifica sono blocchi al livello dei concetti, non lacune al livello dei fatti. Gli ostacoli più difficili da superare sono le tendenze che sfuggono al nostro controllo cosciente per il fatto di sembrare così ovviamente, così ineluttabilmente giuste. Noi conosciamo nel modo migliore noi stessi e tendiamo a interpretare in relazione a noi stessi gli altri organismi: a vedere riflesse in essi la nostra costituzione e le nostre organizzazioni sociali. (Per quasi due millenni Aristotele e i suoi successori chiamarono re la grande ape che guida lo sciame.)”

“Maria Montessori non limitò la sua attività a una riforma pedagogica per l'infanzia, ma per molti anni tenne corsi di antropologia all'Università di Roma. A dir poco, non fu certo una sostenitrice dell'egalitarismo. Accettò la maggior parte del lavoro di Broca e fu una sostenitrice della teoria della criminalità innata sviluppata da Cesare Lombroso. Misurò quindi la circonferenza delle teste dei bambini nelle sue scuole e dedusse che quelli con migliori prospettive avevano cervelli più grandi.”

“L'argomento comune di questi disparati giudizi è la teoria dell'uomo delinquente di Cesare Lombroso, probabilmente la dottrina più influente mai emersa dalla tradizione antropometrica. Lombroso descrisse l'intuizione che condusse alla sua teoria della criminalità innata e alla disciplina da lui fondata: l'antropologia criminale. Nel 1870, Lombroso stava cercando di scoprire le differenze anatomiche tra uomini criminali e uomini insani, "senza avere molto successo". Poi, "la mattina di un triste giorno di dicembre", esaminò il cranio del famoso brigante Villella ed ebbe quel lampo di felice intuizione che contrassegna sia la scoperta brillante che la folle invenzione. Vide in quel cranio una serie di lineamenti atavici che ricordavano un passato scimmiesco piuttosto che un presente umano.”

“La scienza, dal momento che viene praticata dall'uomo, è un'attività socialmente inserita. Essa progredisce per impressioni, immaginazione e intuizione. La maggioranza dei suoi cambiamenti nel tempo non registra un avvicinamento alla verità assoluta, ma il mutamento dei contesti culturali che la influenzano così fortemente. I fatti non sono frammenti puri e incontaminati d'informazione; anche la cultura influenza che cosa vediamo e come la vediamo. Le teorie, inoltre, non sono inesorabili induzioni da fatti. Le teorie più creative sono spesso visioni fantasiose imposte sui fatti: anche la fonte di immaginazione è fortemente culturale.”

“Propongo di evidenziare questo principio fondamentale della rispettosa non interferenza - accompagnata da un dialogo intenso tra le due sfere distinte, ciascuna relativa a un aspetto centrale dell'esistenza umana - enunciando il principio dei MNS, ovvero dei "Magisteri non sovrapposti". Spero che i miei colleghi cattolici non se la prendano per l'appropriazione di questo termine così ricorrente nel loro linguaggio, perché la parola "magistero", derivata dal latino magister, maestro, sta a significare l'autorità dell'insegnamento.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”

“The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.”

“We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”

“Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.”

“Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.”

“Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.”

“When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.”

“Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback […]—toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.”

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

“[H]istorical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation”

“If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the behavior then becomes unnatural and worthy of condemnation. Better to stick resolutely to a philosophical position on human liberty: what free adults do with each other in their own private lives is their business alone. It need not be vindicated — and must not be condemned—by genetic speculation.”

“Anton Chekhov wrote that “one must not put a loaded rifle on stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Good drama requires spare and purposive action, sensible linking of potential causes with realized effects. Life is much messier; nothing happens most of the time. Millions of Americans (many hotheaded) own rifles (many loaded), but the great majority, thank God, do not go off most of the time. We spend most of real life waiting for Godot, not charging once more unto the breach.”

“But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions.”

“We now live, as Earth always has (see my 1996 book Full House), in an Age of Bacteria. These simplest organisms will dominate our planet (if conditions remain hospitable for life at all) until the sun explodes. During our current, and undoubtedly brief, geological moment, they watch with appropriate amusement as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage. For we are, to them, only transient and delectable islands ripe for potential exploitation.”

“Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason cannot save us and can even persecute us in the wrong hands; but we have no hope of salvation without reason. The world is too complex, too intransigent; we cannot bend it to our simple will.”

“Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.”

“The parasite has somehow evolved to turn off the host's defenses, presumably by disarming the crab's immune response with some chemical trickery that fools the host into accepting the parasite as part of itself. …The adult parasite castrates the host, not by directly eating the gonadal tissue, but by some unknown mechanism probably involving penetration of the interna's roots around and into the crab's nervous system.”

“Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.”

“The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.”

“In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms of speciation; punctuated equilibrium merely takes a standard microevolutionary model and elucidates its expected expression when properly scaled into geological time.”

“[W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past […]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.”

“[A]lthough species may be discrete, they have no immutable essence. Variation is the raw material of evolutionary change. It represents the fundamental reality of nature, not an accident about a created norm. Variation is primary; essences are illusory. Species must be defined as ranges of irreducible variation.”

“Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.”

“Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.”

“Darwin himself told us in his last book (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms) that we should never underestimate the power of worms on the move…. The inversion of a humble worm, especially when disturbed, may bring down empires. Shakespeare told us that "the smallest worm will turn being trodden on." And Cervantes wrote in his author's preface to Don Quixote that "even a worm when trod upon, will turn again." …Geoffrey, it seems, was correct after all - not in every detail, of course, but at least in basic vision and theoretical meaning. And the triumph of surprise, the inversion of nuttiness to apparent truth, stands as a premier example of the most exciting general development in evolutionary theory during our times.”

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.””