A Quote by Stephen Jay Gould
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
It's very easy to leave when things go wrong, but to stick around and to basically give life to a town because of everything that it gave you generation after generation after generation, that to me is what defines a true American.
You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.
The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.
People don't change very much, and the things life ends up being about don't change from generation to generation. Life is about love. And people's stories don't really change. Your environment changes dramatically, technology changes, but people don't change, in the way our minds work.
Creationists argue that natural selection is only a negative process, and therefore cannot create anything. Chopra argues that skepticism is only a negative process, and therefore does not lead to knowledge. Both are wrong for the same reasons. They ignore the generation of diversity and new ideas upon which natural selection and skepticism acts. Weeding out the unfit is critical to both - natural selection allows evolution to proceed, and skepticism allows science to advance.
Young people have traditionally skewed left through generation after generation after generation. Exceptions to that, of course. I am one. I never have been a liberal. I rebelled against my parents, but not that way. Never been a liberal. Constitutionally incapable of being a liberal. Who knows why.
Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.
Our generation grew up with technology. It evolved as we grew up. This new generation has had it since they were babies. That's crazy. It fundamentally changes they way they understand and think about technology. They've never known life without it, whereas we knew life without the Internet.
One of the greatest dignities of humankind is that each successive generation is invested in the welfare of each new generation.
Well, the task I've set forth will long outlive our own generation. But together, we too have come through the worst. Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best- a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.
Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.
You're talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face.
One of the things that I am learning is that each generation will have its own negotiations with identity. And one generation can not necessarily help the other generation with it.
Music, Rock and Roll music especially, is such a generational thing. Each generation must have their own music, I had my own in my generation, you have yours, everyone I know has their own generation.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Related Authors
Austin O'Malley Quotes
American
Scientist
Carl Sagan Quotes
American
Scientist
Charles Darwin Quotes
English
Scientist
David Suzuki Quotes
Canadian
Scientist
E. O. Wilson Quotes
American
Scientist
Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
German
Scientist
Isaac Asimov Quotes
American
Scientist
Jane Goodall Quotes
English
Scientist
Margaret Mead Quotes
American
Scientist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
Lebanese
Scientist
Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
American
Scientist
Richard Dawkins Quotes
English
Scientist
Steven Pinker Quotes
Canadian
Scientist
Sylvia Earle Quotes
American
Scientist
Thomas Huxley Quotes
English
Scientist
W. Edwards Deming Quotes
American
Scientist