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.
Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup."
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.
It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.
The guys who walk on Mars are going to be historic.
If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June - a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special: the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.