Science Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Gould is picking a fight with the museum-glass version of science: pristine, sealed off, and best handled by experts in white coats. By calling science "an integral part of culture", he yanks it out of the lab and drops it where it actually lives - in arguments about evidence, in school boards, in headlines, in the everyday stories societies tell about what counts as truth. The line about an "arcane priesthood" is a deliberately barbed metaphor. It frames scientific authority as a kind of secular clergy, warning how easily expertise can harden into hierarchy: rituals, gatekeeping, and a public trained to defer rather than engage.

The intent isn’t to flatter science; it’s to democratize it without dumbing it down. Gould wants science understood as continuous with other cultural achievements - art, philosophy, history - because that framing changes who gets to claim ownership. If science is "foreign", it’s easier to resent it, politicize it, or treat it as optional. If it’s part of the shared intellectual tradition, rejecting it becomes less like skepticism and more like cultural self-sabotage.

Context matters: Gould spent his career translating evolutionary biology for broad audiences while battling creationism, simplistic "progress" narratives, and pop misuses of Darwin. He knew the public’s relationship to science was emotional as much as rational - shaped by trust, identity, and power. The closing phrase, "one of the glories", isn’t mere uplift; it’s a rhetorical gambit that recasts scientific thinking as a humanistic accomplishment, not a technocratic weapon.