"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty"
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Dogma is Gould's real evolutionary villain: not a rival species, but a mental habit that turns curiosity into policing. Coming from a scientist best known for puncturing tidy biological narratives, the line reads less like a generic plea for open-mindedness and more like a warning about how "certainty" metastasizes inside institutions that claim to worship evidence.
The rhetorical force is in the piling-on of consequences: constraining, blinding, destructive. It's not just that dogma is wrong; it's that it narrows the range of questions you allow yourself to ask. Gould understood that scientific progress rarely arrives as a single heroic discovery. It arrives as permission slips: to notice an anomaly, to entertain an unfashionable mechanism, to treat the marginal data point as signal rather than noise. Dogmatic worldviews revoke those permissions. They teach you what counts as a respectable problem before you even look.
The subtext is also defensive. In the late 20th-century battles over evolution, creationism, and the political misuse of biology (from eugenics to simplistic "genes explain everything" stories), Gould repeatedly argued that science is both powerful and fallible. A dogmatic worldview can wear a lab coat or carry a Bible; either way, it converts a living inquiry into a closed system. His phrasing "nothing is more dangerous" is deliberately maximalist, aimed at readers who think dogma is merely annoying. Gould insists it is actively violent to the future because it makes novelty feel like heresy, and innovation dies first in the mind.
The rhetorical force is in the piling-on of consequences: constraining, blinding, destructive. It's not just that dogma is wrong; it's that it narrows the range of questions you allow yourself to ask. Gould understood that scientific progress rarely arrives as a single heroic discovery. It arrives as permission slips: to notice an anomaly, to entertain an unfashionable mechanism, to treat the marginal data point as signal rather than noise. Dogmatic worldviews revoke those permissions. They teach you what counts as a respectable problem before you even look.
The subtext is also defensive. In the late 20th-century battles over evolution, creationism, and the political misuse of biology (from eugenics to simplistic "genes explain everything" stories), Gould repeatedly argued that science is both powerful and fallible. A dogmatic worldview can wear a lab coat or carry a Bible; either way, it converts a living inquiry into a closed system. His phrasing "nothing is more dangerous" is deliberately maximalist, aimed at readers who think dogma is merely annoying. Gould insists it is actively violent to the future because it makes novelty feel like heresy, and innovation dies first in the mind.
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| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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