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Evolving Life Must Experience A Vast Range Of Possibilities, Based On Environmental Histories So Unpredictable That No Realized Route - The Pathway To Consciousness In The Form Of Homo Sapiens Or Little Green Men, For Example - Can Be Construed As A Highway To Heaven, But Must Be Viewed As A Tortuous Track Rutted With Uncountable Obstacles And Festooned With Innumerable Alternative Branches. Any Reasonably Precise Repetition Of Our Earthly Route On Another Planet Therefore Becomes Wildly Improbable Even In A Trillion Cases.
-Stephen Jay Gould
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Evolving Life Must Experience

Stephen Jay Gould
Evolving Life Must Experience A Vast Range Of Possibilities, Based On Environmental Histories So Unpredictable That No Realized Route - The Pathway To Consciousness In The Form Of Homo Sapiens Or Little Green Men, For Example - Can Be Construed As A Highway To Heaven, But Must Be Viewed As A Tortuous Track Rutted With Uncountable Obstacles And Festooned With Innumerable Alternative Branches. Any Reasonably Precise Repetition Of Our Earthly Route On Another Planet Therefore Becomes Wildly Improbable Even In A Trillion Cases.
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Topic
Men
Track
Heaven
More From Stephen Jay Gould
An Old Paleontological In Joke Proclaims That Mammalian Evolution Is A Tale Told By Teeth Mating To Produce Slightly Altered Descendant Teeth.
Teeth
Evolution
Tales
The Darwinian Revolution Is About Essence. The Darwinian Revolution Is About Who We Are, It's What We're Made Of, It's What Our Life Means Insofar As Science Can Answer That Question.
Mean
Essence
Answers
Since The Universe Must Contain Millions Of Appropriate Planets, Consciousness In Some Form - But Not With The Paired Eyes And Limbs, And The Brain Built Of Neurons In The Only Example We Know - May Evolve Frequently. But If Only One Origin Of Life In A Million Ever Leads To Consciousness, Then Martian Bacteria Most Emphatically Do Not Imply Little Green Men.
Eye
Men
Origin Of Life
Natural Selection Is A Theory Of Local Adaptation To Changing Environments. It Proposes No Perfecting Principles, No Guarantee Of General Improvement
Principles
Guarantees
Changing Environment
Current Utility And Historical Origin Are Different Subjects.
Historical
Different
Currents
A Rare Book At Once Of Great Importance And Wonderful To Read.... Gould Presents A Fascinating Historical Study Of Scientific Racism, Tracing It Through Monogeny And Polygeny, Phrenology , Recapitulation, And Hereditarian Iq Theory. He Stops At Each Point To Illustrate Both The Logical Inconsistencies Of The Theories And The Prejudicially Motivated, Albeit Unintentional, Misuse Of Data In Each Case.... A Major Addition To The Scientific Literature.
Book
Data
Racism
Zoocentrism Is The Primary Fallacy Of Human Sociobiology, For This View Of Human Behavior Rests On The Argument That If The Actions Of "lower" Animals With Simple Nervous Systems Arise As Genetic Products Of Natural Selection, Then Human Behavior Should Have A Similar Basis.
Animal
Simple
Views
Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.
Groups
Paleontology
Levels
World Views Are Social Constructions And They Channel The Search For Facts. But Facts Are Found And Knowledge Progresses, However Fitfully.
Views
Perception
Progress
We Live In A Profoundly Nonintellectual Culture, Made All The Worse By A Passive Hedonism Abetted By The Spread Of Wealth And Its Dissipation Into Countless Electronic Devices That Impart The Latest In Entertainment And Supposed Information - All In Short (and Loud) Doses Of "easy Listening".
Listening
Culture
Information
Rifkin's Assertions Bear No Relationship To What I Have Observed And Practiced For 25 Years ... Either I Am Blind Or He Is Wrong - And I Think I Can Show, By Analyzing His Slipshod Scholarship And Basic Misunderstanding Of Science, That His World Is An Invention Constructed To Validate His Own Private Hopes ... Rifkin Shows No Understanding Of The Norms And Procedures Of Science: He Displays Little Comprehension Of What Science Is And How Scientists Work.
Thinking
Years
Understanding
Forelimbs Of People, Porpoises, Bats And Horses Provide The Classic Example Of Homology In Most Textbooks. They Look Different, And Do Different Things, But Are Built Of The Same Bones. No Engineer, Starting From Scratch Each Time, Would Have Built Such Disparate Structures From The Same Parts.
Horse
Time
People
The Contingency Of History (both For Life In General And For The Cultures Of Homo Sapiens ) And Human Free Will (in The Factual Rather Than Theological Sense) Are Conjoined Concepts, And No Better Evidence Can Be Produced Than The "experimental" Production Of Markedly Different Solutions In Identical Environments.
Different
Culture
Environment
Scientists Have Power By Virtue Of The Respect Commanded By The Discipline... We Live With Poets And Politicians, Preachers And Philosophers. All Have Their Ways Of Knowing, And All Are Valid In Their Proper Domain. The World Is Too Complex And Interesting For One Way To Hold All The Answers.
Knowing
Discipline
Interesting
Contrary To Current Cynicism About Past Golden Ages, The Abstraction Known As 'the Intelligent Layperson' Does Exist - In The Form Of Millions Of Folks With A Passionate Commitment To Continuous Learning.
Commitment
Intelligent
Past
In Their Recently Aborted Struggle To Inject Genesis Literalism Into Science Classrooms, Fundamentalist Groups Followed Their Usual Opportunistic Strategy Of Arguing Two Contradictory Sides Of A Question When A Supposed Rhetorical Advantage Could Be Extracted From Each.
Struggle
Two
Usual
The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm.
Science
Evolution
Paradigm
The Myriad Valleys Could Have Arisen Anywhere On The Landscape. The Current Positions Are Quite Accidental. If We Could Repeat The Experiment, We Might Obtain No Valleys At All, Or A Completely Different System. Yet We Now Stand At The Shore Line Contemplating The Fine Spacing Of Valleys And Their Even Contact With The Sea. How Easy It Is To Be Misled And To Assume That No Other Landscape Could Possibly Have Arisen.
Sea
Different
Valleys
We Debase The Richness Of Both Nature And Our Own Minds If We View The Great Pageant Of Our Intellectual History As A Compendium Of New Information Leading From Primal Superstition To Final Exactitude. We Know That The Sun Is Hub Of Our Little Corner Of The Universe, And That Ties Of Genealogy Connect All Living Things On Our Planet, Because These Theories Assemble And Explain So Much Otherwise Disparate And Unrelated Information Not Because Galileo Trained His Telescope On The Moons Of Jupiter Or Because Darwin Took A Ride On A Galápagos Tortoise.
Moon
Views
Ties
With Copious Evidence Ranging From Plato's Haughtiness To Beethoven's Tirades, We May Conclude That The Most Brilliant People Of History Tend To Be A Prickly Lot.
Plato
People
Haughtiness
Humans Are Not The End Result Of Predictable Evolutionary Progress, But Rather A Fortuitous Cosmic Afterthought, A Tiny Little Twig On The Enormously Arborescent Bush Of Life, Which If Replanted From Seed, Would Almost Surely Not Grow This Twig Again.
Progress
Littles
Tiny
'creation Science' Has Not Entered The Curriculum For A Reason So Simple And So Basic That We Often Forget To Mention It: Because It Is False, And Because Good Teachers Understand Exactly Why It Is False.
Teacher
Simple
Creation Science
If Genius Has Any Common Denominator, I Would Propose Breadth Of Interest And The Ability To Construct Fruitful Analogies Between Fields.
Genius
Analogies
Fields
... Many Folks Take Them Seriously Because They Just 'know' That Evolution Can Never Be Seen In The Immediate Here And Now. In Fact, A Precisely Opposite Situation Prevails: Biologists Have Documented A Veritable Glut Of Cases For Rapid And Eminently Measurable Evolution On Timescales Of Years And Decades.
Years
Opposites
Facts
Natural Selection May Lead To Benefits For Species, But These `higher' Advantages Can Only Arise As Sequelae, Or Side Consequences, Of Natural Selection's Causal Mechanism: Differential Reproductive Success Of Individuals.
May
Sides
Benefits
It Is The Things We Think We Know - Because They Are So Elementary Or Because They Surround Us - That Often Present The Greatest Difficulties When We Are Actually Challenged To Explain Them.
Thinking
Difficulty
Knows
I Like To Summarize What I Regard As The Pedestal-smashing Messages Of Darwin's Revolution In The Following Statement, Which Might Be Chanted Several Times A Day, Like A Hare Krishna Mantra, To Encourage Penetration Into The Soul: Humans Are Not The End Result Of Predictable Evolutionary Progress, But Rather A Fortuitous Cosmic Afterthought, A Tiny Little Twig On The Enormously Arborescent Bush Of Life, Which, If Replanted From Seed, Would Almost Surely Not Grow This Twig Again, Or Perhaps Any Twig With Any Property That We Would Care To Call Consciousness.
Soul
Progress
Pedestal
Why, Then, Do I Continue To Claim That Creationism Isn't Science? Simply Because These Relatively Few Statements Have Been Tested And Conclusively Refuted.
Evolution
Creation
Claims
The Dogmatist Within Is Always Worse Than The Enemy Without.
Enemy
Evolution Has Encountered No Intellectual Trouble; No New Arguments Have Been Offered. Creationism Is A Home-grown Phenomenon Of American Sociocultural History-a Splinter Movement ... Who Believe That Every Word In The Bible Must Be Literally True, Whatever Such A Claim Might Mean.
Believe
Home
Mean
Something Deep Within Us Drives Accurate Messiness Into The Neat Channels Of Canonical Stories.
Stories
Deep Within
Neat
For Dawkins, Evolution Is A Battle Among Genes, Each Seeking To Make More Copies Of Itself. Bodies Are Merely The Places Where Genes Aggregate For A Time.
Battle
Body
Evolution
Details Are All That Matters; God Dwells In These And You Never Get To See Him If You Don't Struggle To Get Them Right.
Struggle
Details
Matter
The World, Unfortunately, Rarely Matches Our Hopes And Consistently Refuses To Behave In A Reasonable Manner.
World
Behave
Refuse
Very Little Comes Easily To Our Poor, Benighted Species (the First Creature, After All, To Experiment With The Novel Evolutionary Inventions Of Self-conscious Philosophy And Art). Even The Most "obvious," "accurate," And "natural" Style Of Thinking Or Drawing Must Be Regulated By History And Won By Struggle. Solutions Must Therefore Arise Within A Social Context And Record The Complex Interactions Of Mind And Environment That Define The Possibility Of Human Improvement.
Art
Philosophy
Struggle
We Build Our Personalities Laboriously And Through Many Years, And We Cannot Order Fundamental Changes Just Because We Might Value Their Utility; No Button Reading "positive Attitude" Protrudes From Our Hearts, And No Finger Can Coerce Positivity Into Immediate Action By A Single And Painless Pressing.
Attitude
Reading
Heart
It Has Become, In My View, A Bit Too Trendy To Regard The Acceptance Of Death As Something Tantamount To Intrinsic Dignity. Of Course I Agree With The Preacher Of Ecclesiastes That There Is A Time To Love And A Time To Die - And When My Skein Runs Out I Hope To Face The End Calmly And In My Own Way. For Most Situations, However, I Prefer The More Martial View That Death Is The Ultimate Enemy - And I Find Nothing Reproachable In Those Who Rage Mightily Against The Dying Of The Light.
Running
Science
Acceptance
Mary Anning [is] Probably The Most Important Unsung (or Inadequately Sung) Collecting Force In The History Of Paleontology.
Science
Important
Paleontology
[e]volutionists Sometimes Take As Haughty An Attitude Toward The Next Level Up The Conventional Ladder Of Disciplines: The Human Sciences. They Decry The Supposed Atheoretical Particularism Of Their Anthropological Colleagues And Argue That All Would Be Well If Only The Students Of Humanity Regarded Their Subject As Yet Another Animal And Therefore Yielded Explanatory Control To Evolutionary Biologists.
Attitude
Animal
Discipline
We Are Here Because One Odd Group Of Fishes Had A Peculiar Fin Anatomy That Could Transform Into Legs For Terrestrial Creatures; Because The Earth Never Froze Entirely During An Ice Age; Because A Small And Tenuous Species, Arising In Africa A Quarter Of A Million Years Ago, Has Managed, So Far, To Survive By Hook And By Crook. We May Yearn For A ‘higher Answer’– But None Exists
Atheist
Years
Ice
[in Natural History,] Great Discovery Often Requires A Map To A Hidden Mine Filled With Gems Then Easily Gathered By Conventional Tools, Not A Shiny New Space-age Machine For Penetrating Previously Inaccessible Worlds.
Space
Discovery
Age
Objectivity Cannot Be Equated With Mental Blankness; Rather, Objectivity Resides In Recognizing Your Preferences And Then Subjecting Them To Especially Harsh Scrutiny - And Also In A Willingness To Revise Or Abandon Your Theories When The Tests Fail (as They Usually Do).
Objectivity
Tests
Failing
Any Human Being Is Really Good At Certain Things. The Problem Is That The Things You're Good At Come Naturally. And Since Most People Are Pretty Modest Instead Of An Arrogant S.o.b. Like Me, What Comes Naturally, You Don't See As A Special Skill. It's Just You. It's What You've Always Done.
Work
Passion
Skills
I Strongly Reject Any Conceptual Scheme That Places Our Options On A Line, And Holds That The Only Alternative To A Pair Of Extreme Positions Lies Somewhere Between Them. More Fruitful Perspectives Often Require That We Step Off The Line To A Site Outside The Dichotomy.
Lying
Perspective
Alternatives
If There Is Any Consistent Enemy Of Science, It Is Not Religion, But Irrationalism.
Enemy
Consistent
Ifs
I Love The Wry Motto Of The Paleontological Society, Meant Both Literally And Figuratively, For Hammers Are The Main Tool Of Our Trade: Frango Ut Patefaciam - I Break In Order To Reveal.
Order
Hammers
Tools
The Intricate And Different Life Cycles Of Both Male And Female Root-heads, And The Great Behavioral Sophistication Shown By The Female In Reconfiguring A Host Crab As A Support System, All Underscore The Myopia Of Our Conventional Wisdom In Regarding Rhizocephalans As Degenerate Parasites Because The Adult Anatomy Of Internal Roots And External Sac Seem So Simple.
Simple
Roots
Support Systems
Since We Proposed Punctuated Equilibria To Explain Trends, It Is Infuriating To Be Quoted Again And Again By Creationists-whether Through Design Or Stupidity, I Do Not Know-as Admitting That The Fossil Record Includes No Transitional Forms. Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.
Stupidity
Design
Religion
The Essence Of Darwinism Lies In Its Claim That Natural Selection Creates The Fit. Variation Is Ubiquitous And Random In Direction. It Supplies Raw Material Only. Natural Selection Directs The Course Of Evolutionary Change.
Lying
Essence
Raw Materials
We May Need Simple And Heroic Legends For That Peculiar Genre Of Literature Known As The Textbook. But Historians Must Also Labor To Rescue Human Beings From Their Legends In Science If Only So That We May Understand The Process Of Scientific Thought Aright.
Simple
May
Legends
If We Make This Readjustment To View Homo Sapiens As An Ultimate In Oddball Rarity, And Life At Bacterial Grade As The Common Expression Of A Universal Phenomenon, Then We Could Finally Ask The Truly Fundamental Question Raised By The Prospect Of Martian Fossils. If Life Originates As A General Property Of The Material Universe Under Certain Conditions (probably Often Realized), Then How Much Can The Basic Structure And Constitution Of Life Vary From Place To Independent Place?
Independent
Views
Expression
Acquired Characteristics Are Inherited In Technology And Culture. Lamarckian Evolution Is Rapid And Accumulative. It Explains The Cardinal Difference Between Our Past, Purely Biological Mode Of Change, And Our Current, Maddening Acceleration Toward Something New And Liberating- Or Toward The Abyss.
Past
Technology
Differences
Precise Adaptation, With Each Part Finely Honed To Perform A Definite Function In An Optimal Way, Can Only Lead To Blind Alleys, Dead Ends, And Extinction.
Extinction
Way
Blind
Life Began Three And A Half Billion Years Ago, Necessarily About As Simple As It Could Be, Because Life Arose Spontaneously From The Organic Compounds In The Primeval Oceans.
Ocean
Simple
Years
Among People I Have Met, The Few Whom I Would Term “great” All Share A Kind Of Unquestioned, Fierce Dedication; An Utter Lack Of Doubt About The Value Of Their Activities (or At Least An Internal Impulse That Drives Through Any Such Angst); And Above All, A Capacity To Work (or At Least To Be Mentally Alert For Unexpected Insights) At Every Available Moment Of Every Day Of Their Lives.
Life
Work
Dedication
If Any Issue Should Unite Liberals And Conservatives, Anyone Who Cares About The Integrity Of Human Achievement Or Respect For Human Accomplishment, May We Not All Pledge To Avoid The Silly Censoring That Can Lead To A Codification Of Orwell's Newspeak? Consider John Milton's Reasons For Why Good Arguments Are Often Lost: 'for Want Of Words, No Doubt, Or Lack Of Breath!'
Integrity
Silly
Issues
The History Of Life Is A Tale Of Decimation And Later Stabilization Of Few Surviving Anatomies, Not A Story Of Steady Expansion And Progress.
Life
Progress
Expansion
People May Believe Correct Things For The Damndest And Weirdest Of Wrong Reasons.
Believe
People
May
If I Have Any Insight At All To Contribute It Is This: Find Out What You Are Really Good At And Stick To It.
Sticks
Talent
Insight
I Hardly Recognize What I Do Well. I Just Do It.
Subconscious
Wells
Just Do It
Theory And Fact Are Equally Strong And Utterly Interdependent; One Has No Meaning Without The Other. We Need Theory To Organize And Interpret Facts, Even To Know What We Can Or Might Observe. And We Need Facts To Validate Theories And Give Them Substance.
Strong
Science
Giving
In What I Like To Call The Great Asymmetry, Every Spectacular Incident Of Evil Will Be Balanced By 10,000 Acts Of Kindness, Too Often Unnoted And Invisible.
Positive
Kindness
Evil
The Origin Of Homo Sapiens, As A Tiny Twig On An Improbable Branch Of A Contingent Limb On A Fortunate Tree, Lies Well Below The Boundary.
Tree
Branches
Tiny
...we Must Be Wary Of Granting Too Much Power To Natural Selection By Viewing All Basic Capacities Of Our Brain As Direct Adaptations.
Brain
Too Much Power
Adaptation
Nature Is Objective, And Nature Is Knowable, But We Can Only View Her Through A Glass Darkly And Many Clouds Upon Our Vision Are Of Our Own Making: Social And Cultural Biases, Psychological Preferences, And Mental Limitations (in Universal Modes Of Thought, Not Just Individualized Stupidity).
Clouds
Glasses
Views
... Each With Its Own Beauty, And Each With A Story To Tell.
Beauty
Stories
Evolution
Most Impediments To Scientific Understanding Are Conceptual Locks, Not Factual Lacks. Most Difficult To Dislodge Are Those Biases That Escape Our Scrutiny Because They Seem So Obviously, Even Ineluctably, Just. We Know Ourselves Best And Tend To View Other Creatures As Mirrors Of Our Own Constitution And Social Arrangements. ( Aristotle , And Nearly Two Millennia Of Successors, Designated The Large Bee That Leads The Swarm As A King.
Kings
Views
Two
I Was Lucky To Wander Into Evolutionary Theory, One Of The Most Exciting And Important Of All Scientific Fields. I Had Never Heard Of It When I Started At A Rather Tender Age; I Was Simply Awed By Dinosaurs. I Thought Paleontologists Spent Their Lives Digging Up Bones And Putting Them Together, Never Venturing Beyond The Momentous Issue Of What Connects To What. Then I Discovered Evolutionary Theory. Ever Since Then, The Duality Of Natural History-richness In Particularities And Potential Union In Underlying Explanation-has Propelled Me.
Issues
Important
Atheism
Few Intellectual Tyrannies Can Be More Recalcitrant Than The Truths That Everybody Knows And Nearly No One Can Defend With Any Decent Data (for Who Needs Proof Of Anything So Obvious). And Few Intellectual Activities Can Be More Salutary Than Attempts To Find Out Whether These Rocks Of Ages Might Crumble At The Slightest Tap Of An Informational Hammer.
Data
Rocks
Intellectual
Darwinian Evolution May Be The Most Truthful And Powerful Idea Ever Generated By Western Science, But If We Continue To Illustrate Our Conviction With An Indefensible, Unsupported, Entirely Speculative, And Basically Rather Silly Story, Then We Are Clothing A Thing Of Beauty In Rags - And We Should Be Ashamed, "for The Apparel Oft Proclaims The Man.
Powerful
Silly
Men
Without A Commitment To Science And Rationality In Its Proper Domain, There Can Be No Solution To The Problems That Engulf Us. Still, The Yahoos Never Rest.
Commitment
Science
Problem
The Human Mind Delights In Finding Pattern—so Much So That We Often Mistake Coincidence Or Forced Analogy For Profound Meaning. No Other Habit Of Thought Lies So Deeply Within The Soul Of A Small Creature Trying To Make Sense Of A Complex World Not Constructed For It.
Mistake
Lying
Profound
Good Scholars Struggle To Understand The World In An Integral Way (pedants Bite Off Tiny Bits And Worry Them To Death). These Visions Of Reality [...] Demand Our Respect, For They Are An Intellectual's Only Birthright. They Are Often Entirely Wrong And Always Flawed In Serious Ways, But They Must Be Understood Honorably And Not Subjected To Mayhem By The Excision Of Patches.
Struggle
Reality
Worry
Organisms [...] Are Directed And Limited By Their Past. They Must Remain Imperfect In Their Form And Function, And To That Extent Unpredictable Since They Are Not Optimal Machines. We Cannot Know Their Future With Certainty, If Only Because A Myriad Of Quirky Functional Shifts Lie Within The Capacity Of Any Feature, However Well Adapted To A Present Role.
Lying
Past
Quirky
People Are Storytelling Creatures. We Like Stories That Go Somewhere, And Therefore We Like Trends - Because Trends Are Things That Either Get Better Or Get Worse, So We Can Either Rejoice Or Lament. But We Mistakenly Depict Many Things As Trends Moving In Some Direction. We Take The "full House" Of Variation In A System And Try To Represent It As A Single Number, When In Fact What We Should Be Doing Is Studying The Variation As It Expands And Contracts. If You Look At The History Of The Variation In All Its Complexity, Then You See There's No Trend.
Moving
People
House
Still, Our Creationist Incubi, Who Would Never Let Facts Spoil A Favorite Argument, Refuse To Yield, And Continue To Assert The Absence Of All Transitional Forms By Ignoring Those That Have Been Found, And Continuing To Taunt Us With Admittedly Frequent Examples Of Absence.
Yield
Example
Facts
Nothing Matches The Holiness And Fascination Of Accurate And Intricate Detail.
Fascination
Details
Holiness
I Am, Somehow, Less Interested In The Weight And Convolutions Of Einstein’s Brain Than In The Near Certainty That People Of Equal Talent Have Lived And Died In Cotton Fields And Sweatshops.
Peace
Interesting
People
Science Is Not 'organized Common Sense'; At Its Most Exciting, It Reformulates Our View Of The World By Imposing Powerful Theories Against The Ancient, Anthropocentric Prejudices That We Call Intuition.
Powerful
Views
Common Sense
Change Is More Often A Rapid Transition Between Two Stable States Than A Continuous Transformation At Slow And Steady Rates. . . .change Occurs In Large Leaps Following A Slow Accumulation Of Stress That A System Resists Until It Reaches The Breaking Point. Heat Water, And It Eventually Boils. Oppress The Workers More And More And Bring On The Revolution.
Stress
Two
Point Break
If We Choose A Weak And Foolish Speculation As A Primary Textbook Illustration (falsely Assuming That The Tale Possesses A Weight Of History And A Sanction Of Evidence), Then We Are In For Trouble - As Critics Properly Nail The Particular Weakness, And Then Assume That The Whole Theory Must Be In Danger If Supporters Choose Such A Fatuous Case As A Primary Illustration.
Illustration
Weakness
Nails
I'm Not A Great Deductive Thinker, But I Will Admit To Having Competence In A Very Wide Range Of Things - Not Being Afraid To Try To Write About Baseball, Choral Music And Dinosaurs In The Same Week And See Connections Among Them.
Baseball
Writing
Trying
Surely The Mitochondrion That First Entered Another Cell Was Not Thinking About The Future Benefits Of Cooperation And Integration; It Was Merely Trying To Make Its Own Living In A Tough Darwinian World
Future
Science
Thinking
The Enemy Of Knowledge And Science Is Irrationalism, Not Religion
Enemy
I Am Not [...] Asserting That Humans Are Either Genial Or Aggressive By Inborn Biological Necessity. Obviously, Both Kindness And Violence Lie Within The Bounds Of Our Nature Because We Perpetrate Both, In Spades. I Only Advance A Structural Claim That Social Stability Rules Nearly All The Time And Must Be Based On An Overwhelmingly Predominant (but Tragically Ignored) Frequency Of Genial Acts, And That Geniality Is Therefore Our Usual And Preferred Response Nearly All The Time. [...] [t]he Center Of Human Nature Is Rooted In Ten Thousand Ordinary Acts Of Kindness That Define Our Days.
Kindness
Lying
Usual
Odd Arrangements And Funny Solutions Are The Proof Of Evolution - Paths That A Sensible God Would Never Tread But That A Natural Process, Constrained By History, Follows Perforce.
Religion
Atheism
Path
The Proof Of Evolution Lies In Those Adaptations That Arise From Improbable Foundations.
Lying
Foundation
Evolution
We Are The Offspring Of History, And Must Establish Our Own Paths In This Most Diverse And Interesting Of Conceivable Universes—one Indifferent To Our Suffering, And Therefore Offering Us Maximum Freedom To Thrive, Or To Fail, In Our Own Chosen Way.
Atheist
Offering
Interesting
People Talk About Human Intelligence As The Greatest Adaptation In The History Of The Planet. It Is An Amazing And Marvelous Thing, But In Evolutionary Terms, It Is As Likely To Do Us In As To Help Us Along.
People
Helping
Adaptation
The Equation Of Evolution With Progress Represents Our Strongest Cultural Impediment To A Proper Understanding Of This Greatest Biological Revolution In The History Of Human Thought.
Science
Understanding
Progress
As In 1925, Creationists Are Not Battling For Religion. They Have Been Disowned By Leading Church Men Of All Persuasions, For They Debase Religion Even More Than They Misconstrue Science. They Are A Motley Collection To Be Sure, But Their Core Of Practical Support Lies With The Evangelical Right, And Creationism Is A Mere Stalking Horse Or Subsidiary Issue In A Political Program...the Enemy Is Not Fundamentalism; It Is Intolerance. In This Case, The Intolerance Is Perverse Since It Masquerades Under The 'liberal' Rhetoric Of 'equal Time'.
Horse
Lying
Men
The Spirit Of Plato Dies Hard. We Have Been Unable To Escape The Philosophical Tradition That What We Can See And Measure In The World Is Merely The Superficial And Imperfect Representation Of An Underlying Reality.
Plato
Philosophy
Philosophical
No Geologist Worth Anything Is Permanently Bound To A Desk Or Laboratory, But The Charming Notion That True Science Can Only Be Based On Unbiased Observation Of Nature In The Raw Is Mythology. Creative Work, In Geology And Anywhere Else, Is Interaction And Synthesis: Half-baked Ideas From A Bar Room, Rocks In The Field, Chains Of Thought From Lonely Walks, Numbers Squeezed From Rocks In A Laboratory, Numbers From A Calculator Riveted To A Desk, Fancy Equipment Usually Malfunctioning On Expensive Ships, Cheap Equipment In The Human Cranium, Arguments Before A Road Cut.
Lonely
Creativity
Science
Each Worldview Was A Cultural Product, But Evolution Is True And Separate Creation Is Not. [...] Worldviews Are Social Constructions, And They Channel The Search For Facts. But Facts Are Found And Knowledge Progresses, However Fitfully. Fact And Theory Are Intertwined, And All Great Scientists Understand The Interaction.
Progress
Facts
Evolution
I Am Not, Personally, A Believer Or A Religious Man In Any Sense Of Institutional Commitment Or Practice. But I Have A Great Respect For Religion, And The Subject Has Always Fascinated Me, Beyond Almost All Others (with A Few Exceptions, Like Evolution And Paleontology).
Religious
Commitment
Science
Eternal Vigilance, As They Say, Is The Price Of Freedom. Add Intellectual Integrity To The Cost Basis.
Integrity
Intellectual
Add
The Modern Theory Of Evolution Does Not Require Gradual Change. It In Fact, The Operation Of Darwinian Processes Should Yield Exactly What We See In The Fossil Record. It Is Gradualism That We Must Reject, Not Darwinism.
Yield
Theory Of Evolution
Doe
No Rational Order Of Divine Intelligence Unites Species. The Natural Ties Are Genealogical Along Contingent Pathways Of History.
Order
Ties
Religion
Paleontologists [fossil Experts] Have Paid An Exorbitant Price For Darwin's Argument. We Fancy Ourselves As The Only True Students Of Life's History, Yet To Preserve Our Favored Account Of Evolution By Natural Selection We View Our Data As So Bad That We Almost Never See The Very Process We Profess To Study.
Views
Data
Fancy
I Despair Of Persuading People To Drop The Familiar And Comforting Tactic Of Dichotomy. Perhaps, Instead, We Might Expand The Framework Of Debates By Seeking Other Dichotomies More Appropriate Than, Or Simply Different From, The Conventional Divisions. All Dichotomies Are Simplifications, But The Rendition Of A Conflict Along Differing Axes Of Several Orthogonal Dichotomies Might Provide An Amplitude Of Proper Intellectual Space Without Forcing Us To Forgo Our Most Comforting Tool Of Thought.
Axes
Space
People
[t]he Effects Of General Change [in Literature] Are Most Tellingly Recorded Not In Alteration Of The Best Products, But In The Transformation Of The Most Ordinary Workaday Books; For When Potboilers Adopt The New Style, Then The Revolution Is Complete.
Book
Style
Ordinary
Wind Back The Tape Of Life To The Early Days Of The Burgess Shale; Let It Play Again From An Identical Starting Point, And The Chance Becomes Vanishingly Small That Anything Like Human Intelligence Would Grace The Replay.
Wind
Play
Grace
I Don't Think Academic Writing Ever Was Wonderful. However, Science Used To Be Much Less Specialized.
Writing
Thinking
Wonderful
In Our Struggle To Understand The History Of Life, We Must Learn Where To Place The Boundary Between Contingent And Unpredictable Events That Occur But Once And The More Repeatable, Lawlike Phenomenon That May Pervade Life's History As Generalities.
Struggle
Events
May
But If We Laugh With Derision, We Will Never Understand. Human Intellectual Capacity Has Not Altered For Thousands Of Years So Far As We Can Tell. If Intelligent People Invested Intense Energy In Issues That Now Seem Foolish To Us, Then The Failure Lies In Our Understanding Of Their World, Not In Their Distorted Perceptions.
Lying
Knowledge
Intelligent
When We Look To Presumed Sources Of Origin For Competing Evolutionary Explanations Of The Giraffe's Long Neck, We Find Either Nothing At All, Or Only The Shortest Of Speculative Conjectures. Length, Of Course, Need Not Correspond With Importance. Garrulous Old Polonius , In A Rare Moment Of Clarity, Reminded Us That "brevity Is The Soul Of Wit" (and Then Immediately Vitiated His Wise Observation With A Flood Of Woolly Words About Hamlet 's Madness.
Wise
Long
Soul
The Great Merit Of Stephen Gould's Account Of The Disastrous History Of Phychometrics Is That He Shifts The Argument From A Sterile Contest Between Environmentalists And Hereditarians And Turns It Into An Argument Between Those Who Are Impressed With What Our Biology Stops Us Doing And Those Who Are Impressed With What It Allows Us To Do.
Merit
Argument
Biology
So Much Of Science Proceeds By Telling Stories.
Stories
Telling Stories
Theory-free Science Makes About As Much Sense As Value-free Politics.
Statistics
Theory
Values
Hyper-selectionism Has Been With Us For A Long Time In Various Guises; For It Represents The Late Nineteenth Century's Scientific Version Of The Myth Of Natural Harmony All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds (all Structures Well Designed For A Definite Purpose In This Case). It Is, Indeed, The Vision Of Foolish Dr. Pangloss, So Vividly Satirized By Voltaire In Candide The World Is Not Necessarily Good, But It Is The Best We Could Possibly Have.
Long
Vision
Drs
Ordinary Speciation Remains Fully Adequate To Explain The Causes And Phenomenology Of Punctuation.
Ordinary
Phenomenology
Adequate
A Man Does Not Attain The Status Of Galileo Merely Because He Is Persecuted; He Must Also Be Right.
Science
Men
Doe
The Causes Of Life's History [cannot] Resolve The Riddle Of Life's Meaning.
Causes
Riddle
Resolve
The Most Important Scientific Revolutions All Include, As Their Only Common Feature, The Dethronement Of Human Arrogance From One Pedestal After Another Of Previous Convictions About Our Centrality In The Cosmos.
Humility
Science
Arrogance
Throughout His Last Half-dozen Books, For Example, Arthur Koestler Has Been Conducting A Campaign Against His Own Misunderstanding Of Darwinism. He Hopes To Find Some Ordering Force, Constraining Evolution To Certain Directions And Overriding The Influence Of Natural Selection. [...] Darwinism Is Not The Theory Of Capricious Change That Koestler Imagines. Random Variation May Be The Raw Material Of Change, But Natural Selection Builds Good Design By Rejecting Most Variants While Accepting And Accumulating The Few That Improve Adaptation To Local Environments.
Book
Design
Example
Knowledge And Wonder Are The Dyad Of Our Worthy Lives As Intellectual Beings. Voyager Did Wonders For Our Knowledge, But Performed Just As Mightily In The Service Of Wonder And The Two Elements Are Complementary, Not Independent Or Opposed. The Thought Fills Me With Awe - A Mechanical Contraption That Could Fit In The Back Of A Pickup Truck, Traveling Through Space For Twelve Years, Dodging Around Four Giant Bodies And Their Associated Moons, And Finally Sending Exquisite Photos Across More Than Four Light-hours Of Space From The Farthest Planet In Our Solar System.
Independent
Moon
Light
Human Consciousness Arose But A Minute Before Midnight On The Geological Clock. Yet We Mayflies Try To Bend An Ancient World To Our Purposes, Ignorant Perhaps Of The Messages Buried In Its Long History. Let Us Hope That We Are Still In The Early Morning Of Our April Day.
Morning
Long
Ignorant
The Only Universal Attribute Of Scientific Statements Resides In Their Potential Fallibility. If A Claim Cannot Be Disproven, It Does Not Belong To The Enterprise Of Science.
Doe
Claims
Attributes
I Contend That The Continued Racial Classification Of Homo Sapiens Represents An Outmoded Approach To The General Problem Of Differentiation Within A Species. In Other Words, I Reject A Racial Classification Of Humans For The Same Reasons That I Prefer Not To Divide Into Subspecies The Prodigiously Variable West Indian Land Snails That Form The Subject Of My Own Research.
Land
Differentiation
Research
I Love To Read The Dedications Of Old Books Written In Monarchies For They Invariably Honor Some (usually Insignificant) Knight Or Duke With Fulsome Words Of Sycophantic Insincerity, Praising Him As The Light Of The Universe (in Hopes, No Doubt, For A Few Ducats To Support Future Work); This Old Practice Makes Me Feel Like Such An Honest And Upright Man, By Comparison, When I Put A Positive Spin, Perhaps Ever So Slightly Exaggerated, On A Grant Proposal.
Book
Dedication
Men
We Should Take Comfort In Two Conjoined Features Of Nature: First, That Our World Is Incredibly Strange And Therefore Supremely Fascinating, Second, That However Bizarre And Arcane Our World Might Be, Nature Remains Potentially Comprehensible To The Human Mind.
Our World
Two
Mind
In His Anti-darwinian Book... (and Eponymously Named The Neck Of The Giraffe ), Francis Hitching Tells The Story... "the Need To Survive By Reaching Ever Higher For Food Is, Like So Many Darwinian Explanations Of Its Kind, Little More Than A Post Hoc Speculation." Hitching Is Quite Correct, But He Rebuts A Fairy Story That Darwin Was Far Too Smart To Tell - Even Though The Tale Later Entered Our High School Texts As A "classic Case" Nonetheless.
Smart
Book
School
Mass Extinctions May Not Threaten Distant Futures, But They Are Decidedly Unpleasant For Species Caught Up In The Throes Of Their Power.
Mass Extinction
May
Caught
If We Are Still Here To Witness The Destruction Of Our Planet Some Five Billion Years Or More Hence, Then We Will Have Achieved Something So Unprecedented In The History Of Life That We Should Be Willing To Sing Our Swansong With Joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
Years
Joy
History Of Life
It's True That The Level Of Scientific Knowledge Among Adults Is Very Low, But That's Not Because There Isn't A Natural Interest. I Think Most Kids Are Fascinated By The Natural World. I've Often Said That If You Could Quantify The Mental Power Involved In All The Dinosaur Names Correctly Known And Correctly Spelled By 5-year-old Kids In America, You Could Move Any Mountain On Earth.
Moving
Kids
Thinking
It Seems The Height Of Antiquated Hubris To Claim That The Universe Carried On As It Did For Billions Of Years In Order To Form A Comfortable Abode For Us. Chance And Historical Contingency Give The World Of Life Most Of Its Glory And Fascination. I Sit Here Happy To Be Alive And Sure That Some Reason Must Exist For "why Me?" Or The Earth Might Have Been Totally Covered With Water, And An Octopus Might Now Be Telling Its Children Why The Eight-legged God Of All Things Had Made Such A Perfect World For Cephalopods.
Children
Octopus
Eight
Not Since The Lord Himself Showed His Stuff To Ezekiel In The Valley Of Dry Bones Had Anyone Brought Such Grace And Skill To The Reconstruction Of Animals From Disarticulated Skeletons. Charles R. Knight, Most Celebrated Of Artists In The Reanimation Of Fossils, Painted All The Canonical Figures Of Dinosaurs That Fire Our Fear And Imagination To This Day.
Science
Artist
Animal
Each Of The Major Sciences Has Contributed An Essential Ingredient In Our Long Retreat From An Initial Belief In Our Own Cosmic Importance. Astronomy Defined Our Home As A Small Planet Tucked Away In One Corner Of An Average Galaxy Among Millions; Biology Took Away Our Status As Paragons Created In The Image Of God; Geology Gave Us The Immensity Of Time And Taught Us How Little Of It Our Own Species Has Occupied.
Home
Average
Taught Us
Our World Is Not An Optimal Place, Fine Tuned By Omnipotent Forces Of Selection. It Is A Quirky Mass Of Imperfections, Working Well Enough (often Admirably); A Jury-rigged Set Of Adaptations Built Of Curious Parts Made Available By Past Histories In Different Contexts. A World Optimally Adapted To Current Environments Is A World Without History, And A World Without History Might Have Been Created As We Find It. History Matters; It Confounds Perfection And Proves That Current Life Transformed Its Own Past.
Past
Our World
Perfection
I Am Particularly Fond Of [emmanuel Mendes Da Costa's] Natural History Of Fossils Because This Treatise, More Than Any Other Work Written In English, Records A Short Episode Expressing One Of The Grand False Starts In The History Of Natural Science And Nothing Can Be Quite So Informative And Instructive As A Juicy Mistake.
Mistake
Fossils
Emmanuel
As A Word, Ecology Has Been So Debased By Recent Political Usage That Many People Employ It To Identify Anything Good That Happens Far From Cities And Without Human Interference.
Cities
People
Political
Anything, Even The Conceptually Most Complex Material, Can Be Written For General Audiences Without Any Dumbing Down. Of Course You Have To Explain Things Carefully. This Goes Back To Galileo, Who Wrote His Great Books As Dialogues In Italian, Not As Treatises In Latin. And To Darwin, Who Wrote The Origin Of Species For General Readers. I Think A Lot Of People Pick Up Darwin's Book And Assume It Must Be A Popular Version Of Some Technical Monograph, But There Is No Technical Monograph. That's What He Wrote. So What I'm Doing Is Part Of A Great Humanistic Tradition.
Latin
Book
Italian
The Telephone Is The Greatest Single Enemy Of Scholarship; For What Our Intellectual Forebears Used To Inscribe In Ink Now Goes Once Over A Wire Into Permanent Oblivion.
Humorous
Phones
Intellectual
Misunderstanding Of Probability May Be The Greatest Of All Impediments To Scientific Literacy.
May
Literacy
Probability
The Median Isn't The Message.
Messages
Statistician
Median
I Am Glad That The Life Of Pandas Is So Dull By Human Standards, For Our Efforts At Conservation Have Little Moral Value If We Preserve Creatures Only As Human Ornaments; I Shall Be Impressed When We Show Solicitude For Warty Toads And Slithering Worms.
Effort
Ornaments
Pandas
Our Current Drug Crisis Is A Tragedy Born Of A Phony System Of Classification. For Reasons That Are Little More Than Accidents Of History, We Have Divided A Group Of Nonfood Substances Into Two Categories: Items Purchasable For Supposed Pleasure (such As Alcohol), And Illicit Drugs.
Two
Alcohol
Drug
The Oppressive Weight Of Disaster And Tragedy In Our Lives Does Not Arise From A High Percentage Of Evil Among The Summed Total Of All Acts, But From The Extraordinary Power Of Exceedingly Rare Incidents Of Depravity To Inflict Catastrophic Damage, Especially In Our Technological Age When Airplanes Can Become Powerful Bombs. (an Even More Evil Man, Armed Only With A Longbow, Could Not Have Wreaked Such Havoc At The Battle Of Agincourt In 1415.)
Powerful
Airplane
Men
I Would Rather Label The Whole Enterprise Of Setting A Biological Value Upon Groups For What It Is: Irrelevant, Intellectually Unsound, And Highly Injurious.
Labels
Groups
Enterprise
Can I Pay Any Higher Tribute To A Man [george Gaylord Simpson] Than To State That His Work Both Established A Profession And Sowed The Seeds For Its Own Revision? If Simpson Had Reached Final Truth, He Either Would Have Been A Priest Or Would Have Chosen A Dull Profession. The History Of Life Cannot Be A Dull Profession.
Life
Science
Men
We Must Shed The Old Stereotype Of Anarchists As Bearded Bomb Throwers Furtively Stalking About City Streets At Night.
Night
Cities
Bombs
History Employs Evolution To Structure Biological Events In Time.
Time
Science
History
The Facts Of Nature Are What They Are, But We Can Only View Them Through The Spectacles Of Our Mind. Our Mind Works Largely By Metaphor And Comparison, Not Always (or Often) By Relentless Logic. When We Are Caught In Conceptual Traps, The Best Exit Is Often A Change In Metaphor Not Because The New Guideline Will Be Truer To Nature (for Neither The Old Nor The New Metaphor Lies "out There" In The Woods), But Because We Need A Shift To More Fruitful Perspectives, And Metaphor Is Often The Best Agent Of Conceptual Transition.
Lying
Views
Perspective
What's Important Is That All Human Knowledge Be Made Available To All Intelligent People Who Want To Learn It.
Reading
Intelligent
People
The Classical Argument For Why A Supposedly Decent And Moral Creature Like Homo Sapiens Can Mistreat And Even Extirpate Other Species Rests Upon An Extreme Position In A Continuum. The Cartesian Tradition, Formulated Explicitly In The Seventeenth Century, But Developed In "folk" And Other Versions Throughout Human History No Doubt, Holds That Other Animals Are Little More Than Unfeeling Machines, With Only Humans Enjoying "consciousness," However Defined.
Animal
Doubt
Machines
Always Be Suspicious Of Conclusions That Reinforce Uncritical Hope And Follow Comforting Traditions Of Western Thought.
Hope
Science
Comforting
Biological Determinism Is, In Its Essence, A Theory Of Limits. It Takes The Current Status Of Groups As A Measure Of Where They Should And Must Be ... We Inhabit A World Of Human Differences And Predilections, But The Extrapolation Of These Facts To Theories Of Rigid Limits Is Ideology.
Science
Essence
Differences
Science Is All Those Things Which Are Confirmed To Such A Degree That It Would Be Unreasonable To Withhold One's Provisional Consent.
Science
Degrees
Would Be
The Extreme Rarity Of Transitional Forms In The Fossil Record Persists As A Trade Secret Of Paleontology. Evolutionary Trees That Adorn Our Textbooks Have Data Only At The Tips And Nodes Of Their Branches; The Rest Is Inference, However Reasonable, Not The Evidence Of Fossils.
Data
Tree
Secret
When Scientists Need To Explain Difficult Points Of Theory, Illustration By Hypothetical Example - Rather Than By Total Abstraction - Works Well (perhaps Indispensably) As A Rhetorical Device. Such Cases Do Not Function As Speculations In The Pejorative Sense - As Silly Stories That Provide Insight Into Complex Mechanisms - But Rather As Idealized Illustrations To Exemplify A Difficult Point Of Theory. (other Fields, Like Philosophy And The Law, Use Such Conjectural Cases As A Standard Device.
Philosophy
Silly
Law
Iconography Becomes Even More Revealing When Processes Or Concepts, Rather Than Objects, Must Be Depicted For The Constraint Of A Definite "thing" Cedes Directly To The Imagination. How Can We Draw "evolution" Or "social Organization," Not To Mention The More Mundane "digestion" Or "self-interest," Without Portraying More Of A Mental Structure Than A Physical Reality? If We Wish To Trace The History Of Ideas, Iconography Becomes A Candid Camera Trained Upon The Scholar's Mind.
Reality
Self
Organization
You Put Three Facts Together - That All Organisms Produce More Offspring That Can Survive, That There's Variation Among Organisms, And That At Least Some Of That Variation Is Inherited - And The Syllogistic Inference Is Natural Selection.
Together
Three
Variation
Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview - Nothing More Constraining, More Blinding To Innovation, More Destructive Of Openness To Novelty.
Innovation
Religion
Novelty
The Silliest And Most Tendentious Of Baseball Writing Tries To Wrest Profundity From The Spectacle Of Grown Men Hitting A Ball With A Stick By Suggesting Linkages Between The Sport And Deep Issues Of Morality, Parenthood, History, Lost Innocence, Gentleness, And So On, Seemingly Ad Infinitum . (the Effort Reeks Of Silliness Because Baseball Is Profound All By Itself And Needs No Excuses; People Who Don't Know This Are Not Fans And Are Therefore Unreachable Anyway.
Sports
Baseball
Writing
The Most Erroneous Stories Are Those We Think We Know Best - And Therefore Never Scrutinize Or Question.
Science
Thinking
Fog
The Enemy Is Not Fundamentalism; It Is Intolerance. In This Case, The Intolerance Is Perverse Since It Masquerades Under The "liberal" Rhetoric Of "equal Time." But Mistake It Not.
Mistake
Enemy
Intolerance
Honorable Errors Do Not Count As Failures In Science, But As Seeds For Progress In The Quintessential Activity Of Correction.
Failure
Science
Errors
The Pathways That Have Led To Our Evolution Are Quirky, Improbable, Unrepeatable And Utterly Unpredictable.
Quirky
Pathways
Evolution
... A Local, Indigenous, American Bizarre-ity.
Atheism
Bizarre
Indigenous
All Evolutionary Biologists Know That Variation Itself Is Nature's Only Irreducible Essence... I Had To Place Myself Amidst The Variation.
Essence
Variation
Biologist
The Fundamentalists, By 'knowing' The Answers Before They Start, And Then Forcing Nature Into The Straitjacket Of Their Discredited Preconceptions, Lie Outside The Domain Of Science - Or Any Honest Intellectual Inquiry.
Lying
Knowing
Intellectual
The More Important The Subject And The Closer It Cuts To The Bone Of Our Hopes And Needs, The More We Are Likely To Err In Establishing A Framework For Analysis.
Cutting
Thinking
Important
Guessing Right For The Wrong Reason Does Not Merit Scientific Immortality.
Guessing
Merit
Doe
Charles Darwin Viewed The Fossil Record More As An Embarrassment Than As An Aid To His Theory.
Records
Fossils
Evolution
The History Of Life Is More Adequately Represented By A Picture Of 'punctuated Equilibria' Than By The Notion Of Phyletic Gradualism. The History Of Evolution Is Not One Of Stately Unfolding, But A Story Of Homeostatic Equilibria, Disturbed Only 'rarely' (i.e. Rather Often In The Fullness Of Time) By Rapid And Episodic Events Of Speciation.
Events
Stories
History Of Life
Everything Comes To Us In Fifteen-second Sound Bites And Photo Opportunities. All Possibility For Ambiguity - The Most Precious Trait Of Any Adequate Analysis - Is Erased.
Opportunity
Sound
Analysis
The Real Tragedy Of Human Existence Is Not That We Are Nasty By Nature, But That A Cruel Structural Asymmetry Grants To Rare Events Of Meanness Such Power To Shape Our History.
Real
Rare Events
Tragedy
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.
Lying
Persistence
Keys
The Literal Record Was Not A Hopelessly And Imperfect Fraction Of Truly Insensible Gradation Within Large Populations But An Accurate Reflection Of The Actual Process Identified By Evolutionists As The Chief Motor Of Biological Change. The Theory Of Punctuated Equilibrium Was, In Its Initial Formulation, Little More Than This Insight Adumbrated.
Reflection
Population
Records
I Emphatically Do Not Assert The General 'truth' Of This Philosophy Of Punctuational Change. Any Attempt To Support The Exclusive Validity Of Such A Grandiose Notion Would Border On The Nonsensical.
Philosophy
Support
Borders
Orchids Were Not Made By An Ideal Engineer; They Are Jury-rigged From A Limited Set Of Available Components.
Orchids
Evolution
Made
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.
Reality
Ignorant
Mind
Darwin's Principle Of Natural Selection Leads To The Prediction That The Proper Way To Analyze Any Evolutionary Development Is To See The New Features As Adaptive To Environments. And That's A Perfectly Good Principle. The Problem Is That There Are Many Evolutionary Biologists Who View Everything That Happens In Evolution As Directly Evolved For Adaptive Benefit. And That Just Doesn't Work. Whenever You Build A Structure For Adaptive Reasons, The Structure Is Going To Exhibit Properties That Have Nothing To Do With Adaptation. They're Just Side Consequences.
Evolution
Problem
Environment
Our Creationist Detractors Charge That Evolution Is An Unproved And Unprovable Charade — A Secular Religion Masquerading As Science. They Claim, Above All, That Evolution Generates No Predictions, Never Exposes Itself To Test, And Therefore Stands As Dogma Rather Than Disprovable Science. This Claim Is Nonsense.
Tests
Evolution
Dogma
The Board Transported Its Jurisdiction To A Never-never Land Where A Dorothy Of The New Millennium Might Exclaim: "they Still Call It Kansas, But I Don't Think We're In The Real World Anymore."
Real
Thinking
Land
As A Graduate Student At Columbia University, I Remember The A Priori Derision Of My Distinguished Stratigraphy Professor Toward A Visiting Australian Drifter [a Supporter Of The Theory Of Continental Drift]. Today My Own Students Would Dismiss With Even More Derision Anyone Who Denied The Evident Truth Of Continental Drift - A Prophetic Madman Is At Least Amusing; A Superannuated Fuddy-duddy Is Merely Pitiful.
Today
Students
Graduates
If You Defend A Behavior By Arguing That People Are Programmed Directly For It, Then How Do You Continue To Defend It If Your Speculation Is Wrong, For The Behavior Then Becomes Unnatural And Worthy Of Condemnation. Better To Stick Resolutely To A Philosophical Position On Human Liberty: What Free Adults Do With Each Other In Their Own Private Lives Is Their Business Alone. It Need Not Be Vindicated And Must Not Be Condemned By Genetic Speculation.
Philosophical
People
Liberty
The Basic Formulation, Or Bare-bones Mechanics, Of Natural Selection Is A Disarmingly Simple Argument, Based On Three Undeniable Facts (overproduction Of Offspring, Variation, And Heritability) And One Syllogistic Inference (natural Selection, Or The Claim That Organisms Enjoying Differential Reproductive Success Will, On Average, Be Those Variants That Are Fortuitously Better Adapted To Changing Local Environments, And That These Variants Will Then Pass Their Favored Traits To Offspring By Inheritance).
Simple
Average
Atheism
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?
Nature
Compassion
Interesting
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.
Fall
Errors
Interaction With Others
I Believe That We Can Still Have A Genre Of Scientific Books Suitable For And Accessible Alike To Professionals And Interested Laypeople. The Concepts Of Science, In All Their Richness And Ambiguity, Can Be Presented Without Any Compromise, Without Any Simplification Counting As Distortion, In Language Accessible To All Intelligent People. I Hope That This Book Can Be Read With Profit Both In Seminars For Graduate Students And If The Movie Stinks And You Forgot Your Sleeping Pills On The Businessman's Special To Tokyo.
Believe
Book
Sleep
Science Is Not A Heartless Pursuit Of Objective Information; It Is A Creative Human Activity.
Creative
Heartless
Information
Science Is An Integral Part Of Culture. It's Not This Foreign Thing, Done By An Arcane Priesthood. It's One Of The Glories Of The Human Intellectual Tradition.
Science
Intellectual
Culture
God Was There When It Happened. We Were Not There.... Therefore, We Are Completely Limited To What God Has Seen Fit To Tell Us, And This Information Is In His Written Word.
Scary
Information
Fit
Goethe Died In 1832. As You Know, Goethe Was Very Active In Science. In Fact, He Did Some Very Good Scientific Work In Plant Morphology And Mineralogy. But He Was Quite Bitter At The Way In Which Many Scientists Refused To Grant Him A Hearing Because He Was A Poet And Therefore, They Felt, He Couldn't Be Serious.
Facts
Serious
Way
We Can Now Determine, Easily And Relatively Cheaply, The Detailed Chemical Architecture Of Genes ; And We Can Trace The Products Of These Genes ( Enzymes And Proteins ) As They Influence The Course Of Embryology . In So Doing We Have Made The Astounding Discovery That All Complex Animal Phyla - Arthropods And Vertebrates In Particular - Have Retained, Despite Their Half-billion Years Of Evolutionary Independence, An Extensive Set Of Common Genetic Blueprints For Building Bodies.
Animal
Discovery
Years
The World Is Full Of Signals That We Don't Perceive.
World
Signals
Perceive
Obsolescence Is A Fate Devoutly To Be Wished, Lest Science Stagnate And Die.
Fate
Obsolescence
Dies
Creation Science Has Not Entered The Curriculum For A Reason So Simple And So Basic That We Often Forget To Mention It: Because It Is False, And Because Good Teachers Understand Why It Is False. What Could Be More Destructive Of That Most Fragile Yet Most Precious Commodity In Our Entire Intellectual Heritage-good Teaching-than A Bill Forcing Our Honorable Teachers To Sully Their Sacred Trust By Granting Equal Treatment To A Doctrine Not Only Known To Be False, But Calculated To Undermine Any General Understanding Of Science As An Enterprise?.
Teacher
Teaching
Science
We Are Glorious Accidents Of An Unpredictable Process With No Drive To Complexity, Not The Expected Results Of Evolutionary Principles That Yearn To Produce A Creature Capable Of Understanding The Mode Of Its Own Necessary Construction.
Thinking
Understanding
Principles
Facts And Theories Are Different Things, Not Rungs In A Hierarchy Of Increasing Certainty. Facts Are The World's Data. Theories Are Structures Of Ideas That Explain And Interpret Facts. Facts Do Not Go Away While Scientists Debate Rival Theories For Explaining Them. Einstein's Theory Of Gravitation Replaced Newton's, But Apples Did Not Suspend Themselves In Mid-air Pending The Outcome.
Science
Ideas
Apples
Death Is The Ultimate Enemy - And I Find Nothing Reproachable In Those Who Rage Mightily Against The Dying Of The Light.
Light
Enemy
Dying
History Does Include Aspects Of Directionality, And The Present Range Of Causes And Phenomena Does Not Exhaust The Realm Of Past Possibilities.
Past
History
Causes
Our Searches For Numerical Order Lead As Often To Terminal Nuttiness As To Profound Insight.
Order
Profound
Insight
Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.
Innovation
Novelty
Dangerous
Life Shows No Trend To Complexity In The Usual Sense-only An Asymmetrical Expansion Of Diversity Around A Starting Point Constrained To Be Simple.
Life
Simple
Diversity
No One-liner Can Ever Be Optimal.
Statistics
One Liner
Optimal
I Picture Several Reviewers Of My Own Books As Passing A Long Future Lodged Between Brutus And Judas In The Jaws Of Satan.
Book
Long
Brutus
Humans Arose ... As A Fortuitous And Contingent Outcome Of Thousands Of Linked Events, Any One Of Which Could Have Occurred Differently And Sent History On An Alternative Pathway That Would Not Have Led To Consciousness.
Pathways
Events
Alternatives
It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary Biologist To Write About Extinction Caused By Human Stupidity. Let Me Then Float An Unconventional Plea, The Inverse Of The Usual Argument. The Extinction Of Partula Is Unfair To Partula. That Is The Conventional Argument, And I Do Not Challenge Its Primacy. But We Need A Humanistic Ecology As Well, Both For The Practical Reason That People Will Always Touch People More Than Snails Do Or Can, And For The Moral Reason That Humans Are Legitimately The Measure Of All Ethical Questions For These Are Our Issues, Not Nature's.
Writing
Issues
Ethical Questions
Understanding Quotes: Their Essence and Application

Quotes, or quotations, are powerful tools in communication, encapsulating ideas, emotions, and wisdom in concise expressions. They serve various purposes across different contexts, from academic writing to everyday conversation.

1. Defining Quotes

A quote is a repetition of someone else's statement or thoughts. It can be a direct replication of words spoken or written by another individual, often used to support arguments, provide evidence, or convey profound insights.


2. The Importance of Quotes

2.1. Enhancing Credibility

Incorporating quotes from authoritative sources can bolster the credibility of your work. By referencing experts or primary sources, you demonstrate thorough research and a solid foundation for your arguments.


2.2. Providing Evidence

Quotes serve as concrete evidence to support claims. In academic and professional writing, they validate points made, offering readers a basis to trust the information presented.


2.3. Conveying Emotions and Perspectives

Quotes can encapsulate emotions and perspectives succinctly. They allow writers to express complex feelings or viewpoints through the words of others, often more eloquently than paraphrasing.


3. Types of Quotes

3.1. Direct Quotes

Direct quotes involve copying the exact words from a source, enclosed in quotation marks. They are used when the original wording is significant or particularly well-expressed.


3.2. Indirect Quotes (Paraphrasing)

Indirect quotes restate the original message in your own words. While not enclosed in quotation marks, they still require proper attribution to the original source.


3.3. Block Quotes

Block quotes are lengthy direct quotations, formatted as a separate block of text. They are typically used for quotes exceeding a certain length, varying by citation style. For instance, in APA style, quotes longer than 40 words are formatted as block quotes.



4. Proper Usage of Quotes


4.1. Contextual Relevance

Ensure that the quote you choose is relevant to the topic and adds value to your content. Avoid inserting quotes solely for decorative purposes.


4.2. Integration into Your Writing

Seamlessly integrate quotes into your writing. Introduce them appropriately and follow up with analysis or commentary to connect them to your main points.


4.3. Attribution and Citation

Always attribute quotes to their original authors and provide proper citations according to the required style guide (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).


5. Common Mistakes to Avoid


5.1. Overusing Quotes

Relying too heavily on quotes can overshadow your voice. Use them sparingly to support your arguments, not replace them.


5.2. Lack of Analysis

Presenting a quote without analysis or explanation can leave readers questioning its relevance. Always follow up with your interpretation or discussion.


5.3. Misquoting or Taking Out of Context

Ensure that quotes are accurate and not taken out of context, as this can mislead readers and undermine your credibility.



6. Quotes in Different Contexts


6.1. Academic Writing

In academic writing, quotes are used to support arguments, provide evidence, and engage with existing literature. Proper citation is crucial to avoid plagiarism.


6.2. Journalism

Journalists use quotes to provide firsthand accounts, add authenticity, and present multiple perspectives within a story.


6.3. Literature and Creative Writing

In literature, quotes can be used to convey character voices, themes, and stylistic elements. They enrich narratives and provide depth to storytelling.



7. Punctuation and Formatting


Understanding the correct punctuation and formatting of quotes is essential:


Quotation Marks: Always enclose direct quotes within quotation marks.


Punctuation Placement: In American English, periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks, while colons and semicolons are placed outside.


Block Quotes: For longer quotes, format them as block quotes without quotation marks, and indent the entire block.



8. Ethical Considerations


Ethical use of quotes involves accurate representation, proper attribution, and respect for intellectual property. Misuse can lead to plagiarism, which carries serious academic and professional consequences.

9. Tools for Managing Quotes


Utilize tools like citation generators and plagiarism checkers to manage quotes effectively. These tools help ensure proper formatting and originality in your writing.



Conclusion


Quotes are invaluable in enriching content, providing evidence, and conveying complex ideas succinctly. When used appropriately, they enhance the quality and credibility of your writing. Always ensure relevance, proper integration, and ethical usage to maximize their impact.


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