Background Image

...

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.

-Stephen Jay Gould

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

It Is So Hard

Stephen Jay Gould

...

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.

Views: 6

Topic

Ethical Questions

More From Stephen Jay Gould

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

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 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.

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.

Honorable Errors Do Not Count As Failures In Science, But As Seeds For Progress In The Quintessential Activity Of Correction.

Even The Standard Example Of Ancient Nonsense - The Debate About Angels On Pinheads - Makes Sense Once You Realize That Theologians Were Not Discussing Whether Five Or Eighteen Would Fit, But Whether A Pin Could House A Finite Or An Infinite Number.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A Lot Of Scientists Hate Writing. Most Scientists Love Being In The Lab And Doing The Work And When The Work Is Done, They Are Finished.

I Picture Several Reviewers Of My Own Books As Passing A Long Future Lodged Between Brutus And Judas In The Jaws Of Satan.

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.

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

... No Compelling Data To Support Its Anachronistic Social Darwinism.

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.

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.

Current Utility And Historical Origin Are Different Subjects.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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 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.

Natural Selection Is Just Three Factors - Over-production, Variation, And Inheritance Combined To Produce Adaptation To Changing Local Environments. It's Not A Principle Or Progress; It's Just A Principle Of Local Adaptation. You Don't Make Better Creatures In Any Cosmic Sense; You Make Creatures That Are Better Suited To The Changing Climates Of Their Local Habitats.

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.

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.

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.

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

Something Deep Within Us Drives Accurate Messiness Into The Neat Channels Of Canonical Stories.

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.

Life Is Short, And Potential Studies Infinite. We Have A Much Better Chance Of Accomplishing Something Significant When We Follow Our Passionate Interests And Work In Areas Of Deepest Personal Meaning.

... 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.

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

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.

All Science Is Intelligent Inference; Excessive Literalism Is Delusion, Not A Humble Bowing To Evidence.

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

Why Get Excited Over This Latest Episode In The Long, Sad History Of American Anti-intellectualism? Let Me Suggest That, As Patriotic Americans, We Should Cringe In Embarrassment That, At The Dawn Of A New, Technological Millennium, A Jurisdiction In Our Heartland Has Opted To Suppress One Of The Greatest Triumphs Of Human Discovery.

No One-liner Can Ever Be Optimal.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heydrich, Eichmann, And Company Therefore Invoke The Usual Trick Of Argument For Breaking A True Continuum That Lacks A Compelling Point For Separation: Choose An Arbitrary Dividing Line And Then Treat It As A Self-evident Law Of Nature.

Einstein's Theory Of Gravitation Replaced Newton's, But Apples Did Not Suspend Themselves In Mid-air, Pending The Outcome. And Humans Evolved From Apelike Ancestors Whether They Did So By Darwin's Proposed Mechanism Or By Some Other Yet To Be Discovered.

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

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.

Skepticism's Bad Rap Arises From The Impression That, However Necessary The Activity, It Can Only Be Regarded As A Negative Removal Of False Claims. Not So... Proper Debunking Is Done In The Interest Of An Alternate Model Of Explanation, Not As A Nihilistic Exercise. The Alternate Model Is Rationality Itself, Tied To Moral Decency--the Most Powerful Joint Instrument For Good That Our Planet Has Ever Known.

If New Species Arise Very Rapidly In Small, Peripherally Isolated Local Populations, Then The Great Expectation Of Insensibly Graded Fossil Sequences Is A Chimera. A New Species Does Not Evolve In The Area Of Its Ancestors; It Does Not Arise From The Slow Transformation Of All Its Forbears. Co-author With Niles Eldridge

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview - Nothing More Constraining, More Blinding To Innovation, More Destructive Of Openness To Novelty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Always Be Suspicious Of Conclusions That Reinforce Uncritical Hope And Follow Comforting Traditions Of Western Thought.

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

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

The Median Isn't The Message.

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

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.

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

We Live In An Essential And Unresolvable Tension Between Our Unity With Nature And Our Dangerous Uniqueness. Systems That Attempt To Place And Make Sense Of Us By Focusing Exclusively Either On The Uniqueness Or The Unity Are Doomed To Failure. But We Must Not Stop Asking And Questing Because The Answers Are Complex And Ambiguous.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People Are Clever, But Almost No One Ever Devises An Optimal Quip Precisely At The Needed Moment. Therefore, Virtually All Great One-liners Are Later Inventions - Words That People Wished They Had Spouted, But Failed To Manufacture At The Truly Opportune Instant.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The History Of Life Is A Tale Of Decimation And Later Stabilization Of Few Surviving Anatomies, Not A Story Of Steady Expansion And Progress.

Nature Is What She Is - Amoral And Persistent.

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.

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.

People May Believe Correct Things For The Damndest And Weirdest Of Wrong Reasons.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

If There Is Any Consistent Enemy Of Science, It Is Not Religion, But Irrationalism.

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.

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."

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.

Great Theories Are Expansive; Failures Mire Us In Dogmatism And Tunnel Vision.

If I Have Any Insight At All To Contribute It Is This: Find Out What You Are Really Good At And Stick To It.

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

Changing Environment

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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!'

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

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

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.

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.

'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

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.

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.

World Views Are Social Constructions And They Channel The Search For Facts. But Facts Are Found And Knowledge Progresses, However Fitfully.

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?

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

Creationist Critics Often Charge That Evolution Cannot Be Tested, And Therefore Cannot Be Viewed As A Properly Scientific Subject At All. This Claim Is Rhetorical Nonsense.

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.

Perhaps Randomness Is Not Merely An Adequate Description For Complex Causes That We Cannot Specify. Perhaps The World Really Works This Way, And Many Events Are Uncaused In Any Conventional Sense Of The Word. Perhaps Our Gut Feeling That It Cannot Be So Reflects Only Our Hopes And Prejudices, Our Desperate Striving To Make Sense Of A Complex And Confusing World, And Not The Ways Of Nature.

Unfortunately, All Life On Earth - The Only Life We Know - Represents, For All Its Current Variety, The Results Of A Single Experiment , For Every Earthly Species Evolved From The Common Ancestry Of A Single Origin. We Desperately Need A Repetition Of The Experiment (several Would Be Better, But Let's Not Be Greedy!) In Order To Make A Judgement. Mars Represents Our First Real Hope For A Second Experiment - The Sine Qua Non - For Any Proper Answer For The Question Of Questions.

We Pass Through This World But Once.

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

The Human Brain Became Large By Natural Selection (who Knows Why, But Presumably For Good Cause). Yet Surely Most "things" Now Done By Our Brains, And Essential Both To Our Cultures And To Our Very Survival, Are Epiphenomena Of The Computing Power Of This Machine, Not Genetically Grounded Darwinian Entities Created Specifically By Natural Selection For Their Current Function.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

I Hardly Recognize What I Do Well. I Just Do It.

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.

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.

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.

Science Can't Tell Us What Our Life Means Ethically. It Can't Tell Us What We Are Meant To Do As Moral Creatures. But, Insofar As Science Can Understand What We're Made Of, And What We're Related To, The Darwinian Revolution Completely Revised Our Ideas About Who We Are And What We're Related To And How Long We've Been Here And Why We're On This Earth.

If A Man Dies Of Cancer In Fear And Despair, Then Cry For His Pain And Celebrate His Life. The Other Man, Who Fought Like Hell And Laughed In The End, But Also Died, May Have Had An Easier Time In His Final Months, But Took His Leave With No More Humanity.

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.

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.

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'.

Speciation Does Not Necessarily Promote Evolutionary Change; Rather, Speciation 'gathers In' And Guards Evolutionary Change By Locking And Stabilization For Sufficient Geological Time Within A Darwinian Individual Of The Appropriate Scale. If A Change In A Local Population Does Not Gain Such Protection, It Becomes-to Borrow Dawkins's Metaphor At A Macroevolutionary Scale-a Transient Duststorm In The Desert Of Time, A Passing Cloud Without Borders, Integrity, Or Even The Capacity To Act As A Unit Of Selection, In The Panorama Of Life's Phylogeny.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

But We All Recognise The Primary Foible Of Frail Humanity - Our Propensity For Embracing Hope And Shunning Logic, Our Tendency To Believe What We Desire Rather Than What We Observe.

[g]enes Make Enzymes, And Enzymes Control The Rates Of Chemical Processes. Genes Do Not Make "novelty Seeking" Or Any Other Complex And Overt Behavior. Predisposition Via A Long Chain Of Complex Chemical Reactions, Mediated Through A More Complex Series Of Life's Circumstances, Does Not Equal Identification Or Even Causation.

A Complete Theory Of Evolution Must Acknowledge A Balance Between "external" Forces Of Environment Imposing Selection For Local Adaptation And "internal" Forces Representing Constraints Of Inheritance And Development. Vavilov Placed Too Much Emphasis On Internal Constraints And Downgraded The Power Of Selection. But Western Darwinians Have Erred Equally In Practically Ignoring (while Acknowledging In Theory) The Limits Placed On Selection By Structure And Development What Vavilov And The Older Biologists Would Have Called "laws Of Form.

Theory Of Evolution

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

Mass Extinction

Life Shows No Trend To Complexity In The Usual Sense-only An Asymmetrical Expansion Of Diversity Around A Starting Point Constrained To Be Simple.

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.

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.

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.

The Theory Of Punctuated Equilibrium, Proposed By Niles Eldredge And Myself, Is Not, As So Often Misunderstood, A Radical Claim For Truly Sudden Change, But A Recognition That Ordinary Processes Of Speciation, Properly Conceived As Glacially Slow By The Standard Of Our Own Life-span, Do Not Resolve Into Geological Time As Long Sequences Of Insensibly Graded Intermediates (the Traditional, Or Gradualistic, View), But As Geologically "sudden" Origins At Single Bedding Planes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?

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.

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.

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.

My Own Field Of Paleontology Has Strongly Challenged The Darwinian Premise That Life's Major Transformations Can Be Explained By Adding Up, Through The Immensity Of Geological Time, The Successive Tiny Changes Produced Generation After Generation By Natural Selection.

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.

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

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.

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.

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".

[t]ruly Grand And Powerful Theories [...] Do Not And Cannot Rest Upon Single Observations. Evolution Is An Inference From Thousands Of Independent Sources, The Only Conceptual Structure That Can Make Unified Sense Of All This Disparate Information. The Failure Of A Particular Claim Usually Records A Local Error, Not The Bankruptcy Of A Central Theory. [...] If I Mistakenly Identify Your Father's Brother As Your Own Dad, You Don't Become Genealogically Rootless And Created De Novo. You Still Have A Father; We Just Haven't Located Him Properly.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The Argument That The Literal Story Of Genesis Can Qualify As Science Collapses On Three Major Grounds: The Creationists' Need To Invoke Miracles In Order To Compress The Events Of The Earth's History Into The Biblical Span Of A Few Thousand Years; Their Unwillingness To Abandon Claims Clearly Disproved, Including The Assertion That All Fossils Are Products Of Noah's Flood; And Their Reliance Upon Distortion, Misquote, Half-quote, And Citation Out Of Context To Characterize The Ideas Of Their Opponents.

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.

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.

Evolution Is One Of The Two Or Three Most Primally Fascinating Subjects In All The Sciences.

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.

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.

So Much Of Science Proceeds By Telling Stories.

Telling Stories

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.

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.

Trending Author

David Ben-Gurion

Amitabh Bachchan

Category