Stephen Jay Gould

The most erroneous stories are those in which a little truth is so mixed with a great deal of falsehood, that the falsehood appears to be an improvement.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses driven by values, hopes, and fears.

We are the offspring of a contingent history, not the predictable product of any grand design.

The human brain is an organ of belief.

Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts.

The case for the creative power of natural selection is not made by the elimination of alternatives, but by the positive evidence of adaptation.

The history of life is not a story of predictable progress but a chronicle of contingency, a pathway of random events and unpredictable outcomes.

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process.

The central feature of punctuated equilibrium is that evolutionary change is concentrated in geologically instantaneous events of speciation, and that species, once formed, are generally stable.

The most important scientific revolutions are those that overturn our most cherished notions.

No scientific theory is a sacred text.

The human mind is not a blank slate, but a richly structured and constrained organ.

The greatest impediment to scientific progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

The world is a complex and messy place, and our theories must reflect that complexity.

We are not the summit of creation, but a small, contingent twig on the tree of life.

Science is a way of knowing, not the only way of knowing.

The history of life is a story of grand experiments, most of which fail.

The human brain is a product of evolution, and its structure and function are shaped by natural selection.

The greatest challenge to science is not to discover new facts, but to understand the facts we already have.

The world is not a machine, but a complex, dynamic system.