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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.

-Stephen Jay Gould

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I Am Particularly Fond

Stephen Jay Gould

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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.

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Orchids Manufacture Their Intricate Devices From The Common Components Of Ordinary Flowers, Parts Usually Fitted For Very Different Functions. If God Had Designed A Beautiful Machine To Reflect His Wisdom And Power, Surely He Would Not Have Used A Collection Of Parts Generally Fashioned For Other Purposes. Orchids Were Not Made By An Ideal Engineer; They Are Jury-rigged From A Limited Set Of Available Components. Thus, They Must Have Evolved From Ordinary Flowers.

The Median Isn't The Message.

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.

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.

Eternal Vigilance, As They Say, Is The Price Of Freedom. Add Intellectual Integrity To The Cost Basis.

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.

History Of Life

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.

The Journalistic Tradition So Exalts Novelty And Flashy Discovery, As Reputable And Newsworthy, That Standard Accounts For The Public Not Only Miss The Usual Activity Of Science But Also, And More Unfortunately, Convey A False Impression About What Drives Research.

[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.

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.

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

If Genius Has Any Common Denominator, I Would Propose Breadth Of Interest And The Ability To Construct Fruitful Analogies Between Fields.

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.

'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.

Creation Science

We Are The Accidental Result Of An Unplanned Process ... The Fragile Result Of An Enormous Concatenation Of Improbabilities, Not The Predictable Product Of Any Definite Process.

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.

Results Rarely Specify Their Causes Unambiguously. If We Have No Direct Evidence Of Fossils Or Human Chronicles, If We Are Forced To Infer A Process Only From Its Modern Results, Then We Are Usually Stymied Or Reduced To Speculation About Probabilities. For Many Roads Lead To Almost Any Rome.

Before Kuhn, Most Scientists Followed The Place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge Tradition, And Would Have Told You That They Hoped, Above All, To Lay Many Of The Bricks, Perhaps Even The Keystone, Of Truth's Temple. Now Most Scientists Of Vision Hope To Foment Revolution. We Are, Therefore, Awash In Revolutions, Most Self-proclaimed.

An Old Paleontological In Joke Proclaims That Mammalian Evolution Is A Tale Told By Teeth Mating To Produce Slightly Altered Descendant Teeth.

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.

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.

Phony Psychics Like Uri Geller Have Had Particular Success In Bamboozling Scientists With Ordinary Stage Magic, Because Only Scientists Are Arrogant Enough To Think That They Always Observe With Rigorous And Objective Scrutiny, And Therefore Could Never Be So Fooled While Ordinary Mortals Know Perfectly Well That Good Performers Can Always Find A Way To Trick People.

I Have Often Been Amused By Our Vulgar Tendency To Take Complex Issues, With Solutions At Neither Extreme Of A Continuum Of Possibilities, And Break Them Into Dichotomies, Assigning One Group To One Pole And The Other To An Opposite End, With No Acknowledgment Of Subtleties And Intermediate Positions And Nearly Always With Moral Opprobrium Attached To Opponents.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ethical Questions

Advocates For A Single Line Of Progress Encounter Their Greatest Stumbling Block When They Try To Find A Smooth Link Between The Apparently Disparate Designs Of The Invertebrates And Vertebrates.

Sure We Fit. We Wouldn't Be Here If We Didn't. But The World Wasn't Made For Us And It Will Endure Without Us.

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.

Science Is All Those Things Which Are Confirmed To Such A Degree That It Would Be Unreasonable To Withhold One's Provisional Consent.

Any Decent Writer Writes Because There's Some Deep Internal Need To Keep Learning.

Skepticism Is The Agent Of Reason Against Organized Irrationalism--and Is Therefore One Of The Keys To Human Social And Civic Decency.

Look In The Mirror, And Don't Be Tempted To Equate Transient Domination With Either Intrinsic Superiority Or Prospects For Extended Survival.

Nature Is What She Is - Amoral And Persistent.

I Don't Think Academic Writing Ever Was Wonderful. However, Science Used To Be Much Less Specialized.

All Organisms Vary, And It's Just Folk Knowledge. You Just Have To Look Around A Room Of People, And Everybody Knows That It's True. Darwin Didn't Know The Mechanism Of Heredity, But You Don't Have To. You Just Need To Know The Fact Of It.

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.

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.

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.

Contingency Is A Thing Unto Itself, Not The Titration Of Determinism By Randomness.

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.

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.

Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?

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.

The Most Erroneous Stories Are Those We Think We Know Best - And Therefore Never Scrutinize Or Question.

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.

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.

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).

Fundamentalism Is Rigorously And Systematically Used To Indoctrinate And Subjugate Young Minds. It Is A Contraceptive Designed To Prevent Intellectual Fertilization.

All Interesting Issues In Natural History Are Questions Of Relative Frequency, Not Single Examples. Everything Happens Once Amidst The Richness Of Nature. But When An Unanticipated Phenomenon Occurs Again And Again—finally Turning Into An Expectation—then Theories Are Overturned.

Guessing Right For The Wrong Reason Does Not Merit Scientific Immortality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Darwinian Natural Selection Only Yields Adaptation To Changing Local Environments, And Better Function In An Immediate Habitat Might Just As Well Be Achieved By Greater Simplicity In Form And Behavior As By Ever-increasing Complexity.

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.

Support Systems

Mass Extinctions May Not Threaten Distant Futures, But They Are Decidedly Unpleasant For Species Caught Up In The Throes Of Their Power.

Mass Extinction

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?

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.

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.

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.)

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.

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.

A Man Does Not Attain The Status Of Galileo Merely Because He Is Persecuted; He Must Also Be Right.

Charles Darwin Viewed The Fossil Record More As An Embarrassment Than As An Aid To His Theory.

Facts Do Not 'speak For Themselves'; They Are Read In The Light Of Theory.

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.

I Would Rather Label The Whole Enterprise Of Setting A Biological Value Upon Groups For What It Is: Irrelevant, Intellectually Unsound, And Highly Injurious.

I Dreamed Of Becoming A Scientist, In General, And A Paleontologist, In Particular, Ever Since The Tyrannosaurus Skeleton Awed And Scared Me.

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.

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.

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.

Interaction With Others

We Have Become, By The Power Of A Glorious Evolutionary Accident Called Intelligence, The Stewards Of Life's Continuity On Earth. We Did Not Ask For This Role, But We Cannot Abjure It. We May Not Be Suited To It, But Here We Are.

Nothing Matches The Holiness And Fascination Of Accurate And Intricate Detail.

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.

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.

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.

The World Is Full Of Signals That We Don't Perceive.

No Rational Order Of Divine Intelligence Unites Species. The Natural Ties Are Genealogical Along Contingent Pathways Of History.

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.

Evolution Is An Obstacle Course Not A Freeway; The Correct Analogue For Long-term Success Is A Distant Punt Receiver Evading Legions Of Would-be Tacklers In An Oddly Zigzagged Path Toward A Goal, Not A Horse Thundering Down The Flat.

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.

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.

But Our Ways Of Learning About The World Are Strongly Influenced By The Social Preconceptions And Biased Modes Of Thinking That Each Scientist Must Apply To Any Problem. The Stereotype Of A Fully Rational And Objective Scientific Method, With Individual Scientists As Logical (and Interchangeable) Robots, Is Self-serving Mythology.

Asian Homo Erectus Died Without Issue And Does Not Enter Our Immediate Ancestry (for We Evolved From African Populations); Neanderthal People Were Collateral Cousins, Perhaps Already Living In Europe While We Emerged In Africa... In Other Words, We Are An Improbable And Fragile Entity, Fortunately Successful After Precarious Beginnings As A Small Population In Africa, Not The Predictable End Result Of A Global Tendency. We Are A Thing, An Item Of History, Not An Embodiment Of General Principles.

We Who Revel In Nature's Diversity And Feel Instructed By Every Animal Tend To Brand Homo Sapiens As The Greatest Catastrophe Since The Cretaceous Extinction.

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.

Some Evolutionists Will Protest That We Are Caricaturing Their View Of Adaptation. After All, Do They Not Admit Genetic Drift, Allometry, And A Variety Of Reasons For Nonadaptive Evolution?

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.

We Must [it Has Been Arued] Go Beyond Reductionism To A Holistic Recognition That Biology And Culture Interpenetrate In An Inextricable Manner.

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.

[evolution Is] One Of The Best Documented, Most Compelling And Exciting Concepts In All Of Science.

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.

Some Beliefs May Be Subject To Such Instant, Brutal And Unambiguous Rejection. For Example: No Left-coiling Periwinkle Has Ever Been Found Among Millions Of Snails Examined. If I Happen To Find One During My Walk On Nobska Beach Tomorrow Morning, A Century Of Well Nurtured Negative Evidence Will Collapse In An Instant.

Ordinary Speciation Remains Fully Adequate To Explain The Causes And Phenomenology Of Punctuation.

The World Is Too Complex For Subsumption Under Any General Theory Of Change.

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.

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.

Misunderstanding Of Probability May Be The Greatest Of All Impediments To Scientific Literacy.

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.

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?

How Did Scientists Get Money In The Past? They Were Either Lucky And Independently Wealthy, Like Darwin, Or They Had Patrons, Like Galileo. Universities Or Governments Have Become Patrons Only In The Last Few Generations. Many Of The Great Scientists Of The Past Were In Debt To Their Patrons In The Same Sense That Modern Scientists Are Influenced By What Their Granting Agencies Want.

Words Change Their Meanings, Just As Organisms Evolve. We Would Impose An Enormous Burden On Our Economy If We Insisted On Payment In Cattle Every Time We Identified A Bonus As A Pecuniary Advantage (from The Latin Pecus , Or Cattle, A Verbal Fossil From A Former Commercial Reality).

The Causes Of Life's History [cannot] Resolve The Riddle Of Life's Meaning.

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.

Obsolescence Is A Fate Devoutly To Be Wished, Lest Science Stagnate And Die.

Most Books, After All, Are Ephemeral; Their Specifics, Several Years Later, Inspire About As Much Interest As Daily Battle Reports From The Hundred Years' War.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?.

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.

Contingency Is Rich And Fascinating; It Embodies An Exquisite Tension Between The Power Of Individuals To Modify History And The Intelligible Limits Set By Laws Of Nature. The Details Of Individual And Species's Lives Are Not Mere Frills, Without Power To Shape The Large-scale Course Of Events, But Particulars That Can Alter Entire Futures, Profoundly And Forever.

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.

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

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.

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.

In The Great Debates Of Early-nineteenth Century Geology, Catastrophists Followed The Stereotypical Method Of Objective Science-empirical Literalism. They Believed What They Saw, Interpolated Nothing, And Read The Record Of The Rocks Directly.

Taxonomy (the Science Of Classification) Is Often Undervalued As A Glorified Form Of Filing-with Each Species In Its Folder, Like A Stamp In Its Prescribed Place In An Album; But Taxonomy Is A Fundamental And Dynamic Science, Dedicated To Exploring The Causes Of Relationships And Similarities Among Organisms. Classifications Are Theories About The Basis Of Natural Order, Not Dull Catalogues Compiled Only To Avoid Chaos.

South America Had Been An Island Continent, Far Bigger And Far More Diverse Than Australia, For Tens Of Millions Of Years Before The Isthmus Of Panama Rose Just A Couple Of Million Years Ago. The Resulting Flood Of North American Mammals Across The New Land Bridge Corresponds In Time With The Decimation Of The Native South American Fauna. In Fact, Most Large Mammals Generally Considered Distinctly South American... Are All Recent Migrants From North America.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The Truly Awesome Intellectuals In Our History Have Not Merely Made Discoveries; They Have Woven Variegated, But Firm, Tapestries Of Comprehensive Coverage. The Tapestries Have Various Fates: Most Burn Or Unravel In The Footsteps Of Time And The Fires Of Later Discovery. But Their Glory Lies In Their Integrity As Unified Structures Of Great Complexity And Broad Implication.

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.

All Evolutionary Biologists Know That Variation Itself Is Nature's Only Irreducible Essence... I Had To Place Myself Amidst The Variation.

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.

... A Local, Indigenous, American Bizarre-ity.

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.

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.

In Science, 'fact' Can Only Mean 'confirmed To Such A Degree That It Would Be Perverse To Withhold Provisional Assent.' I Suppose That Apples Might Start To Rise Tomorrow, But The Possibility Does Not Merit Equal Time In Physics Classrooms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When People Learn No Tools Of Judgment And Merely Follow Their Hopes, The Seeds Of Political Manipulation Are Sown.

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.

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.

... Each With Its Own Beauty, And Each With A Story To Tell.

The Proof Of Evolution Lies In Those Adaptations That Arise From Improbable Foundations.

What An Odd Time To Be A Fundamentalist About Adaptation And Natural Selection - When Each Major Subdiscipline Of Evolutionary Biology Has Been Discovering Other Mechanisms As Adjuncts To Selection's Centrality.

Our Searches For Numerical Order Lead As Often To Terminal Nuttiness As To Profound Insight.

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.

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.

The Invalid Assumption That Correlation Implies Cause Is Probably Among The Two Or Three Most Serious And Common Errors Of Human Reasoning.

Science Simply Cannot Adjudicate The Issue Of God's Possible Superintendence Of Nature.

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.

If Evolution Almost Always Occurs By Rapid Speciation In Small, Peripheral Isolates, Then What Should The Fossil Record Look Like? We Are Not Likely To Detect The Event Of Speciation Itself. It Happens Too Fast, In Too Small A Group, Isolated Too Far From The Ancestral Range.

I Am Willing To Believe That My Unobtainable Sixty Seconds Within A Sponge Or A Flatworm Might Not Reveal Any Mental Acuity That I Would Care To Call Consciousness. But I Am Also Confident [...] That Vultures And Sloths, As Close Evolutionary Relatives With The Same Basic Set Of Organs, Lie On Our Side Of Any Meaningful (and Necessarily Fuzzy) Border And That We Are Therefore Not Mistaken When We Look Them In The Eye And See A Glimmer Of Emotional And Conceptual Affinity.

The Pathways That Have Led To Our Evolution Are Quirky, Improbable, Unrepeatable And Utterly Unpredictable.

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.

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.

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."

The Center Of Human Nature Is Rooted In Ten Thousand Ordinary Acts Of Kindness That Define Our Days.

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.

True Majorities, In A Tv-dominated And Anti-intellectual Age, May Need Sound Bites And Flashing Lights And I Am Not Against Supplying Such Lures If They Draw Children Into Even A Transient Concern With Science. But Every Classroom Has One [oliver] Sacks , One [eric] Korn, Or One [jonathan] Miller , Usually A Lonely Child With A Passionate Curiosity About Nature, And A Zeal That Overcomes Pressures For Conformity. Do Not The One In Fifty Deserve Their Institutions As Well Magic Places, Like Cabinet Museums, That Can Spark The Rare Flames Of Genius?

Natural Selection Is A Theory Of Local Adaptation To Changing Environments. It Proposes No Perfecting Principles, No Guarantee Of General Improvement

Changing Environment

I View The Major Features Of My Own Odyssey As A Set Of Mostly Fortunate Contingencies. I Was Not Destined By Inherited Mentality Or Family Tradition To Become A Paleontologist. I Can Locate No Tradition For Scientific Or Intellectual Careers Anywhere On Either Side Of My Eastern European Jewish Background. I View My Serious And Lifelong Commitment To Baseball In Entirely The Same Manner: Purely As A Contingent Circumstance Of Numerous, Albeit Not Entirely Capricious, Accidents.

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.

Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science Is Not A Heartless Pursuit Of Objective Information; It Is A Creative Human Activity.

No One Supposed That Dinoflagellates Might Actively Kill Fish As An Evolved Response For Their Own Specific Advantage, Including A Potential Nutritional Benefit For The Algal Cells. And Yet The Dinoflagellates Do Seem To Be Killing And Eating Fishes In A Manner Suggesting Active Evolution For This Most Peculiar Reversal.

Orchids Were Not Made By An Ideal Engineer; They Are Jury-rigged From A Limited Set Of Available Components.

The Absence Of Fossil Evidence For Intermediary Stages Between Major Transitions In Organic Design, Indeed Our Inability, Even In Our Imagination, To Construct Functional Intermediates In Many Cases, Has Been A Persistent And Nagging Problem For Gradualist Accounts Of Evolution.

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.

No One Should Feel At All Offended Or Threatened By The Obvious Fact That We Are Not All Born Entirely Blank, Or Entirely The Same, In Our Mixture Of The Broad Behavioral Propensities Defining What We Call "temperament".

... 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.

We Pass Through This World But Once.

No One-liner Can Ever Be Optimal.

Sigmund Freud Often Remarked That Great Revolutions In The History Of Science Have But One Common, And Ironic, Feature: They Knock Human Arrogance Off One Pedestal After Another Of Our Previous Conviction About Our Own Self-importance.

Few Tragedies Can Be More Extensive Than The Stunting Of Life, Few Injustices Deeper Than The Denial Of An Opportunity To Strive Or Even To Hope, By A Limit Imposed From Without, But Falsely Identified As Lying Within.

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.

Differentiation

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.

The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm.

Theory-free Science Makes About As Much Sense As Value-free Politics.

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.

History Of Life

Siphonophores Do Not Convey The Message A Favorite Theme Of Unthinking Romanticism That Nature Is But One Gigantic Whole, All Its Parts Intimately Connected And Interacting In Some Higher, Ineffable Harmony. Nature Revels In Boundaries And Distinctions; We Inhabit A Universe Of Structure. But Since Our Universe Of Structure Has Evolved Historically, It Must Present Us With Fuzzy Boundaries, Where One Kind Of Thing Grades Into Another.

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.

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.

I Would Trade All The Advantages Of Humanity To Be A Fly On The Wall When Franklin And Jefferson Discussed Liberty, Lenin And Trotsky Revolution, Newton And Halley The Shape Of The Universe, Or When Darwin Entertained Huxley And Lyell At Down.

The Enemy Of Knowledge And Science Is Irrationalism, Not Religion

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.

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.

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.

Evolution Is An Inference From Thousands Of Independent Sources, The Only Conceptual Structure That Can Make Unified Sense Of All This Disparate Information.

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.

...we Must Be Wary Of Granting Too Much Power To Natural Selection By Viewing All Basic Capacities Of Our Brain As Direct Adaptations.

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).

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.

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