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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.

-Stephen Jay Gould

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People Are Storytelling Creatures.

Stephen Jay Gould

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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.

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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.

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.

In What I Like To Call The Great Asymmetry, Every Spectacular Incident Of Evil Will Be Balanced By 10,000 Acts Of Kindness, Too Often Unnoted And Invisible.

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.

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

Organisms Are Not Billiard Balls, Propelled By Simple And Measurable External Forces To Predictable New Positions On Life's Pool Table. Sufficiently Complex Systems Have Greater Richness. Organisms Have A History That Constrains Their Future In Myriad, Subtle Ways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

So Much Of Science Proceeds By Telling Stories.

Telling Stories

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

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Mass Extinction

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.

Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?

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Memory Is A Fascinating Trickster. Words And Images Have Enormous Power And Can Easily Displace Actual Experience Over The Years.

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'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

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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.

Antiessentialist Thinking Forces Us To View The World Differently. We Must Accept Shadings And Continua As Fundamental. We Lose Criteria For Judgment By Comparison To Some Ideal: Short People, Retarded People, People Of Other Beliefs, Colors, And Religions Are People Of Full Status.

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 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.

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.

We Must Shed The Old Stereotype Of Anarchists As Bearded Bomb Throwers Furtively Stalking About City Streets At Night.

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

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.

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

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.

The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.

Death Is The Ultimate Enemy - And I Find Nothing Reproachable In Those Who Rage Mightily Against The Dying Of The Light.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

There Is No Gene "for" Such Unambiguous Bits Of Morphology As Your Left Kneecap Or Your Fingernail. [...] Hundreds Of Genes Contribute To The Building Of Most Body Parts And Their Action Is Channeled Through A Kaleidoscopic Series Of Environmental Influences: Embryonic And Postnatal, Internal And External. Parts Are Not Translated Genes, And Selection Doesn't Even Work Directly On Parts.

... 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.

History Employs Evolution To Structure Biological Events In Time.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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.

As We Discern A Fine Line Between Crank And Genius, So Also (and Unfortunately) We Must Acknowledge An Equally Graded Trajectory From Crank To Demagogue. When People Learn No Tools Of Judgment And Merely Follow Their Hopes, The Seeds Of Political Manipulation Are Sown.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Can Envision Observations And Experiments That Would Disprove Any Evolutionary Theory I Know.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What You See Is That The Most Outstanding Feature Of Life's History Is A Constant Domination By Bacteria.

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.

[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.

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

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.

History Does Include Aspects Of Directionality, And The Present Range Of Causes And Phenomena Does Not Exhaust The Realm Of Past Possibilities.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Recapitulation Provided A Convenient Focus For The Persuasive Racism Of White Scientists; They Looked To The Activities Of Their Own Children For Comparison With Normal Adult Behavior In Lower Races.

Mary Anning [is] Probably The Most Important Unsung (or Inadequately Sung) Collecting Force In The History Of Paleontology.

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).

Current Utility And Historical Origin Are Different Subjects.

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.

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

Without A Commitment To Science And Rationality In Its Proper Domain, There Can Be No Solution To The Problems That Engulf Us. Still, The Yahoos Never Rest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When We Seek A Textbook Case For The Proper Operation Of Science, The Correction Of Certain Error Offers Far More Promise Than The Establishment Of Probable Truth. Confirmed Hunches, Of Course, Are More Upbeat Than Discredited Hypotheses. Since The Worst Traditions Of "popular" Writing Falsely Equate Instruction With Sweetness And Light, Our Promotional Literature Abounds With Insipid Tales In The Heroic Mode, Although Tough Stories Of Disappointment And Loss Give Deeper Insight Into A Methodology That The Celebrated Philosopher Karl Popper Once Labeled As "conjecture And Refutation.

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

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.

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.

We Pass Through This World But Once.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Nature Is What She Is - Amoral And Persistent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Enemy Of Knowledge And Science Is Irrationalism, Not Religion

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.

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.

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.

Good Scholars Struggle To Understand The World In An Integral Way (pedants Bite Off Tiny Bits And Worry Them To Death). These Visions Of Reality [...] Demand Our Respect, For They Are An Intellectual's Only Birthright. They Are Often Entirely Wrong And Always Flawed In Serious Ways, But They Must Be Understood Honorably And Not Subjected To Mayhem By The Excision Of Patches.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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 A Process Of Constant Branching And Expansion.

Life Is A Copiously Branching Bush, Continually Pruned By The Grim Reaper Of Extinction, Not A Ladder Of Predictable Progress.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Cannot Win This Battle To Save Species And Environments Without Forging An Emotional Bond Between Ourselves And Nature As Well - For We Will Not Fight To Save What We Do Not Love.

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.

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

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.

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.

Rifkin's Assertions Bear No Relationship To What I Have Observed And Practiced For 25 Years ... Either I Am Blind Or He Is Wrong - And I Think I Can Show, By Analyzing His Slipshod Scholarship And Basic Misunderstanding Of Science, That His World Is An Invention Constructed To Validate His Own Private Hopes ... Rifkin Shows No Understanding Of The Norms And Procedures Of Science: He Displays Little Comprehension Of What Science Is And How Scientists Work.

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.

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

Changing Environment

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Pictures Are Not Incidental Frills To A Text; They Are Essences Of Our Distinctive Way Of Knowing.

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

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

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