Stephen J. Gould On Prisca Sapientia

"... since we have a lamentable tendency to view our own age as best, these divisions often saddle the past with pejorative names while designating successively more modern epochs with words of light and progress." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"Our conventional divisions of Western history are mired in these twinned errors of false categorization and pejorative designation." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"I write this essay to point out that the most prominent of all scientific stories in this mode -- the supposed Dark and Medieval consensus for a flat earth -- is entirely mythological." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"Classical scholars, of course, had no doubt about the earth's sphericity." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"There was never a period of 'flat earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"Virtually all major scholars affirmed the earth's roundness." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"Purveyors of the flat-earth myth could never deny this plain testimony of Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and others -- so they argued that these men acted as rare beacons of light in pervasive darkness. But consider the absurdity of such a position. Who formed the orthodoxy representing the consensus of ignorance? Two pip-squeaks named Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes? Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and their ilk were not brave iconocalasts. They formed the establishment, and their convictions about the earth's roundness stood canonical, while Lactantius and colleagues remained entirely marginal." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"As another interesting similarity, both men developed their basic model of science vs. theology in the context of a seminal and contemporary struggle all too easily viewed in this light – the battle for evolution, specifically for Darwin’s secular version based on natural selection." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Darwinian revolution directly triggered this influential nineteenth-century conceptualization of Western history as a war between two taxonomic categories labeled science and religion. White made an explicit connection in his statement about Agassiz (the founder of the museum where I now work, and a visiting lecturer at Cornell). Moreover, the first chapter of his book treats the battle over evolution, while the second begins with the flat-earth myth" -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"Draper wraps himself even more fully in the Darwinian mantle." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

"... the myth of a war between science and religion remains all too current...." -- Stephen J. Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Late Birth of a Flat Earth, 1995

Stephen J. Gould: Dinosaur In a Haystack, The Late Birth of the Flat Earth, 1995