Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Interpretation
Gould emphasizes that evolution is a testable scientific theory despite criticism.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould defends the scientific validity of evolution against creationist critiques, asserting that the claim that evolution cannot be tested is fundamentally flawed. He highlights the importance of evaluating scientific theories based on their ability to be scrutinized and tested, reiterating that evolution meets these criteria, thus firmly placing it within the realm of scientific inquiry.
In practice
In a debate about the teaching of evolution in schools, one might use this quote to defend the scientific basis of evolution.
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.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.
If we're going to go farther from Earth, to Mars or somewhere else someday, we have to have a good understanding of the psychological impact on people. And not only psychologically, but how it affects their cognition. We're doing a lot of research on my cognitive abilities.
Water is the key to dealing with the twin challenges of poverty and growth.
My expertise is the space program and what it should be in the future based on my experience of looking at the transitions that we've made between pre-Sputnik days and getting to the moon.
Einstein, stop telling God what to do!
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.