# Quote — Stephen Jay Gould, I Have Landed

> The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright.

- Author: [Stephen Jay Gould](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould.md)
- Book: [I Have Landed](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed.md)
- Page: 331
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#I_Have_Landed_(2002)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/the-vigorous-branching

## More from this book

> In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).

p. 6 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/in-return-for.md)

> Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes “for” particular items of anatomy or behavior.

p. 234 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/complex-organisms-cannot.md)

> No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

p. 48 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/i-have-landed/no-more-harmful.md)