Frases de Stephen Jay Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould fue un paleontólogo estadounidense, geólogo, biólogo evolutivo, historiador de la ciencia y uno de los más influyentes y leídos divulgadores científicos de su generación.[1]​

Gould pasó la mayor parte de su carrera docente en la Universidad de Harvard y trabajando en el Museo Americano de Historia Natural de Nueva York. En los últimos años de su vida, impartió clases de biología y evolución en la Universidad de Nueva York, cercana a su residencia en el SoHo.

La mayor contribución de Gould a la ciencia fue la teoría del equilibrio puntuado que desarrolló con Niles Eldredge en 1972.[2]​ La teoría propone que la mayoría de los procesos evolutivos están compuestos por largos períodos de estabilidad, interrumpidos por episodios cortos y poco frecuentes de bifurcación evolutiva. La teoría contrasta con el gradualismo filogenético, la idea generalizada de que el cambio evolutivo se caracteriza por un patrón homogéneo y continuo.

La mayor parte de la investigación empírica de Gould se basó en los géneros de caracoles terrestres Poecilozonites y Cerion y además contribuyó a la biología evolutiva del desarrollo. En su teoría evolutiva se opuso al seleccionismo estricto, la sociobiología aplicada a seres humanos y la psicología evolucionista. Hizo campaña contra el creacionismo y propuso que la ciencia y la religión sean considerados dos ámbitos distintos, o «magisterios», cuyas autoridades no se superponen .[3]​

Muchos de los ensayos de Gould para la revista Natural History fueron reimpresos en libros entre los que sobresalen Desde Darwin y El pulgar del panda. Sus tratados más populares incluyen libros como La falsa medida del hombre, La vida maravillosa y La grandeza de la vida. Poco tiempo antes de su muerte, Gould publicó un largo tratado recapitulando su versión de la teoría evolutiva moderna llamado La estructura de la teoría de la evolución . Wikipedia  

✵ 10. septiembre 1941 – 20. mayo 2002
Stephen Jay Gould: 282   frases 10   Me gusta

Frases célebres de Stephen Jay Gould

“Un hombre no alcanza el estatus de Galileo simplemente porque sea perseguido, sino que también debe tener la razón.”

Fuente: Stephen Jay Gould: Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1977, 1992), 154.

“El hecho de la evolución está tan bien establecido como cualquier otro en la ciencia (tan seguro como la traslación de la Tierra alrededor del Sol).”

Fuente: Réplica de Stephen Jay Gould, en la Universidad de Harvard, al artículo de Irving Kristol en The New York Times el 30 de septiembre de 1986; fue publicada en el número de enero de 1987 de la revista de divulgación científica Discover.

Stephen Jay Gould: Frases en inglés

“This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 329
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 320
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability.”

I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.
"A Time to Laugh", p. 82; originally published as "A Happy Mystery to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?" in The Wall Street Journal (2001-10-10)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.
Fuente: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1342

“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro I Have Landed

An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

“If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would surely have corrected his earlier report that apes showed more promise than Old World monkeys and noted that monkeys had overcome an original disadvantage to gain domination among primates.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro Eight Little Piggies

He will confirm this statement after his visit next year—but also add a footnote that one species from the ape bush has enjoyed an unusual and unexpected flowering, thus demanding closer monitoring.
"The Declining Empire of Apes", p. 288
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum.”

The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.
"The Creation Myths of Cooperstown", p. 46
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens.”

And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.
Prologue, p. 13
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

“The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro La vida maravillosa

Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.
Fuente: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

“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 know nothing about them because of the survivorlship bias.””

Stephen Jay Gould libro The Panda's Thumb

"Wide hats and narrow minds" https://books.google.com/books?id=-lWtVSZoqWkC&pg=PA776 New Scientist 8 March 1979, p. 777. Reprinted in The Panda's Thumb, p. 151 https://books.google.com/books?id=z0XY7Rg_lOwC&pg=PA151.

“Yesterday’s seer is today’s bore.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro An Urchin in the Storm

"The Quack Detector", p. 244
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Few campaigns are more dangerous than emotional calls for proscription rather than thought.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro An Urchin in the Storm

"Integrity and Mr. Rifkin", p. 238
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Scientists ignorant of history are not so much condemned to repeat it, as to be confused and unenterprising.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 187
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“Useful quantification is so often the key to fruitful science.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 184
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“The beauty of nature lies in detail; the message, in generality.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro La vida maravillosa

Fuente: Wonderful Life (1989), Preface

“Life is a ramifying bush with millions of branches, not a ladder.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro An Urchin in the Storm

Fuente: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Perils of Hope", p. 211
Contexto: Darwinism is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments, not a tale of inevitable progress. “After long reflection,” Darwin wrote, “I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists.”
Jastrow might argue that he is only considering the single pathway through the immense labyrinth of life’s bush that happened to lead to us. Even here I might reply that while we have a personal motive for special interest in (and affection for) this particular pathway, we have no right to regard it (or any other) as the essential direction of life. The pathways leading to aardvarks, anchovies, or artichokes are just as long, intricate, and biologically informative.

“The study of social setting does not imply either the irrelevance or nonexistence of a factual world out there.”

Stephen Jay Gould libro An Urchin in the Storm

Fuente: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "The Power of Narrative", p. 84

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