Science can't tell us what our life means ethically. It can't tell us what we are meant to do as moral creatures. But, insofar as science can understand what we're made of, and what we're related to, the Darwinian revolution completely revised our ideas about who we are and what we're related to and how long we've been here and why we're on this Earth.
Stephen Jay GouldCreation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage-good teaching-than a bill forcing our honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?.
Stephen Jay GouldScience is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
Stephen Jay GouldNot since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.
Stephen Jay GouldThe origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.
Stephen Jay Gould