Stephen Jay Gould Quotes:
Ocupation: Paleontologist
Life: September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002
Birthday: September 10
Death: May 20
I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.
source: "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327, 1995.
topic: Soul, Progress, Pedestal, Mantras, Hares, End Results, Fortuitous, Smashing, Penetration, Afterthought, Hare Krishna
