# Quote — Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies

> [S]cience is often regarded as the most objective and truth-directed of human enterprises, and since direct observation is supposed to be the favored route to factuality, many people equate respectable science with visual scrutiny—just the facts ma'am, and palpably before my eyes. But science is a battery of observational and inferential methods, all directed to the testing of propositions that can, in principle, be definitely proven false. […] At all scales, from smallest to largest, quickest to slowest, many well-documented conclusions of science lie beyond the strictly limited domain of direct observation. No one has ever seen an electron or a black hole, the events of a picosecond or a geological eon.

- Author: [Stephen Jay Gould](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould.md)
- Book: [Eight Little Piggies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies.md)
- Page: 200
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#Eight_Little_Piggies_(1993)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/s-cience-is-often

## More from this book

> Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/contingency-is-rich.md)

> [W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past […]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.

p. 206 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/w-e-do-live.md)

> Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?

p. 324 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/perhaps-i-am-just.md)