Quote #21

There is no gene 'for' such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. [:] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts.

More from Stephen Jay Gould

  1. The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
  2. The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no dire…
  3. Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version o…
  4. Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of natu…
  5. Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument re…
  6. I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that deba…
  7. Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwi…
  8. Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconven…

All Stephen Jay Gould quotes