How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like Galileo. Universities or governments have become patrons only in the last few generations. Many of the great scientists of the past were in debt to their patrons in the same sense that modern scientists are influenced by what their granting agencies want.
Stephen Jay GouldThe invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.
Stephen Jay GouldLife is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
Stephen Jay GouldWind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
Stephen Jay GouldThe literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.
Stephen Jay Gould