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“... and superfluous lie’. This was not what Gosse had said, even if it was only a short step away. Stephen JayGould, one of the few 20th-century scientists who have tried to do justice to Gosse’s thinking, pointed out that the problem with Gosse’s book is not that it is mistaken, but that it is useless. Its central ...”

“... to us, or would it be reassuringly familiar? One way of settling the issue, suggested by the late Stephen JayGould, would be to wind the tape of life back to its origins, around four and a half billion years ago, then let the tape run again and see what happens. Ideally, we’d repeat this a few thousand times, and if ...”

“... stereotypes and taken up with the demands of survival. Prescod-Weinstein’s words echo those of Stephen JayGould forty years ago: ‘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 ...”

“... from the ‘Sehnsucht’ sketchbook in 1887, and sustained by such unlikely commentators as Stephen Spender (whom Lockwood quotes), that Beethoven’s first ideas were clumsy and could be refined into masterpieces only by a generalised sort of titanic struggle. Instead of losing himself in pious admiration of Beethoven’s persistence in building ...”

“... which are frequently pressed by appeal to scientific authorities (notably Richard Lewontin and Stephen JayGould) somewhat limited in number. The problem is compounded by the author’s honesty in conceding that a good number of criticisms (for example, those based on attempts to revive the inheritance of acquired ...”

“... planets are single-celled microbes. These are beginning to look like the masters of creation. Stephen JayGould points out that the first two billion years of life on Earth was the age of bacteria, and nothing much has changed since. Taxonomists used to think of evolution as a ladder, from microbes to us, and then ...”

“... It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K ...”

“... It is still often proposed that religion and science need not conflict. Stephen JayGould held that they occupy ‘non-overlapping magisteria’: science deals with questions of fact, religion with questions of value and meaning. This is wishful thinking, because religions base themselves on factual claims ...”

“... to his discovery: ‘Wars are only a means of publicising the thing already accomplished.’ Stephen Kern has pointed out that the Cubist quality of camouflage was quite widely perceived during the war. The artist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, who was one of the forces behind France’s camouflage initiative, claimed to have used Cubist means to ...”

“... featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show … He gets kicked off in ...”

“... often try to harmonise the two by declaring that they are mutually exclusive domains, or, to use Stephen JayGould’s phrase, ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould proposes that science limit itself to studying and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human ...”

“... giants, the Arche meets the Stereo, the Perennial meets the Fad. Mitchell cites at the start Stephen JayGould’s reference to the ‘archetypal fascination’ with dinosaurs (giving rise, as Gould puts it, to schemes to ‘turn the Jungian substrate into profits’) and ...”