Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Quotes

“This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History

“Single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History

“As a chief ingredient in the mythology of science, the accumulation of objective facts supposedly controls the history of conceptual change–as logical and self-effacing scientists bow before the dictates of nature and willingly change their views to accommodate the growth of conceptual knowledge. The paradigm for such an idealistic notion remains Huxley’s famous remark about “a beautiful theory killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.” But single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away (and properly so, for the majority of deeply anomalous observations turn out to be wrong)...

Anomalous facts get incorporated into existing theories, often with a bit of forced stretching to be sure, but usually with decent fit because most worldviews contain considerable flexibility. (How else could they last so long, or be so recalcitrant to overthrow?)”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History