"Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)
"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of the new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)
"[…] science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. […] Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)
"Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)
"In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent'." (Stephen J Gould, 1983)
"Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word." (Stephen J Gould, "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes", 1983)
"Well 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. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them." (Stephen J Gould, "Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes", 1983)
"The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 1985)
"We often think, naïvely, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress - just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 1985)
"Numbers have undoubted powers to beguile and benumb, but critics must probe behind numbers to the character of arguments and the biases that motivate them." (Stephen J Gould, "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas", 1987)
"All great theories are expansive, and all notions so rich in scope and implication are underpinned by visions about the nature of things. You may call these visions ‘philosophy’, or ‘metaphor’, or ‘organizing principle’, but one thing they are surely not - they are not simple inductions from observed facts of the natural world." (Stephen J Gould, "Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle", 1987)
"Numbers have undoubted powers to beguile and benumb, but critics must probe behind numbers to the character of arguments and the biases that motivate them." (Stephen J Gould, "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas", 1987)
"The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people." (Stephen J Gould, "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History", 1990)
"Probability does pervade the universe, and in this sense, the old chestnut about baseball imitating life really has validity. The statistics of streaks and slumps, properly understood, do teach an important lesson about epistemology, and life in general. The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon, that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor!" (Stephen J Gould, 1991)
"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)
"I do not know that my view is more correct; I do not even think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are good categories for assessing complex mental models of external reality - for models in science are judged [as] useful or detrimental, not as true or false." (Stephen J Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History", 1995)
"Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy." (Stephen J Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in natural history", 1995)
"Scientists reach their conclusions for the damnedest of reasons: intuition, guesses, redirections after wild-goose chases, all combing with a dollop of rigorous observation and logical reasoning to be sure […] This messy and personal side of science should not be disparaged, or covered up, by scientists for two major reasons. First, scientists should proudly show this human face to display their kinship with all other modes of creative human thought […] Second, while biases and references often impede understanding, these mental idiosyncrasies may also serve as powerful, if quirky and personal, guides to solutions." (Stephen J Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in natural history", 1995)
"Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality)." (Stephen J Gould, "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms", 1998)
"The human mind delights in finding pattern - so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 2010)
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