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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.

-Stephen Jay Gould

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The Vigorous Branching Of

Stephen Jay Gould

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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.

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

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.

We Are Storytelling Animals, And Cannot Bear To Acknowledge The Ordinariness Of Our Daily Lives.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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 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.

The Legends Of Fieldwork Locate All Important Sites Deep In Inaccessible Jungles Inhabited By Fierce Beasts And Restless Natives, And Surrounded By Miasmas Of Putrefaction And Swarms Of Tsetse Flies.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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?

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

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

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.

Human Life Is The Result Of A Glorious Evolutionary Accident.

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.

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

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.

What's Important Is That All Human Knowledge Be Made Available To All Intelligent People Who Want To Learn It.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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.

Facts And Theories Are Different Things, Not Rungs In A Hierarchy Of Increasing Certainty. Facts Are The World's Data. Theories Are Structures Of Ideas That Explain And Interpret Facts. Facts Do Not Go Away While Scientists Debate Rival Theories For Explaining Them. Einstein's Theory Of Gravitation Replaced Newton's, But Apples Did Not Suspend Themselves In Mid-air Pending The Outcome.

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.

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.

People Are Storytelling Creatures. We Like Stories That Go Somewhere, And Therefore We Like Trends - Because Trends Are Things That Either Get Better Or Get Worse, So We Can Either Rejoice Or Lament. But We Mistakenly Depict Many Things As Trends Moving In Some Direction. We Take The "full House" Of Variation In A System And Try To Represent It As A Single Number, When In Fact What We Should Be Doing Is Studying The Variation As It Expands And Contracts. If You Look At The History Of The Variation In All Its Complexity, Then You See There's No Trend.

The 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Acquired Characteristics Are Inherited In Technology And Culture. Lamarckian Evolution Is Rapid And Accumulative. It Explains The Cardinal Difference Between Our Past, Purely Biological Mode Of Change, And Our Current, Maddening Acceleration Toward Something New And Liberating- Or Toward The Abyss.

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.

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.

Forelimbs Of People, Porpoises, Bats And Horses Provide The Classic Example Of Homology In Most Textbooks. They Look Different, And Do Different Things, But Are Built Of The Same Bones. No Engineer, Starting From Scratch Each Time, Would Have Built Such Disparate Structures From The Same Parts.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

[e]volutionists Sometimes Take As Haughty An Attitude Toward The Next Level Up The Conventional Ladder Of Disciplines: The Human Sciences. They Decry The Supposed Atheoretical Particularism Of Their Anthropological Colleagues And Argue That All Would Be Well If Only The Students Of Humanity Regarded Their Subject As Yet Another Animal And Therefore Yielded Explanatory Control To Evolutionary Biologists.

We Debase The Richness Of Both Nature And Our Own Minds If We View The Great Pageant Of Our Intellectual History As A Compendium Of New Information Leading From Primal Superstition To Final Exactitude. We Know That The Sun Is Hub Of Our Little Corner Of The Universe, And That Ties Of Genealogy Connect All Living Things On Our Planet, Because These Theories Assemble And Explain So Much Otherwise Disparate And Unrelated Information Not Because Galileo Trained His Telescope On The Moons Of Jupiter Or Because Darwin Took A Ride On A Galápagos Tortoise.

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.

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!'

Current Utility And Historical Origin Are Different Subjects.

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).

Scientists Have Power By Virtue Of The Respect Commanded By The Discipline... We Live With Poets And Politicians, Preachers And Philosophers. All Have Their Ways Of Knowing, And All Are Valid In Their Proper Domain. The World Is Too Complex And Interesting For One Way To Hold All The Answers.

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

The Median Isn't The Message.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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

Anything, Even The Conceptually Most Complex Material, Can Be Written For General Audiences Without Any Dumbing Down. Of Course You Have To Explain Things Carefully. This Goes Back To Galileo, Who Wrote His Great Books As Dialogues In Italian, Not As Treatises In Latin. And To Darwin, Who Wrote The Origin Of Species For General Readers. I Think A Lot Of People Pick Up Darwin's Book And Assume It Must Be A Popular Version Of Some Technical Monograph, But There Is No Technical Monograph. That's What He Wrote. So What I'm Doing Is Part Of A Great Humanistic Tradition.

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

[t]he Effects Of General Change [in Literature] Are Most Tellingly Recorded Not In Alteration Of The Best Products, But In The Transformation Of The Most Ordinary Workaday Books; For When Potboilers Adopt The New Style, Then The Revolution Is Complete.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'creation Science' Has Not Entered The Curriculum For A Reason So Simple And So Basic That We Often Forget To Mention It: Because It Is False, And Because Good Teachers Understand Exactly Why It Is False.

Creation Science

We Pass Through This World But Once.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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."

For Dawkins, Evolution Is A Battle Among Genes, Each Seeking To Make More Copies Of Itself. Bodies Are Merely The Places Where Genes Aggregate For A Time.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

When We Look To Presumed Sources Of Origin For Competing Evolutionary Explanations Of The Giraffe's Long Neck, We Find Either Nothing At All, Or Only The Shortest Of Speculative Conjectures. Length, Of Course, Need Not Correspond With Importance. Garrulous Old Polonius , In A Rare Moment Of Clarity, Reminded Us That "brevity Is The Soul Of Wit" (and Then Immediately Vitiated His Wise Observation With A Flood Of Woolly Words About Hamlet 's Madness.

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.

Historical Science Is Not Worse, More Restricted, Or Less Capable Of Achieving Firm Conclusions Because Experiment, Prediction, And Subsumption Under Invariant Laws Of Nature Do Not Represent Its Usual Working Methods. The Sciences Of History Use A Different Mode Of Explanation, Rooted In The Comparative And Observational Richness In Our Data. We Cannot See A Past Event Directly, But Science Is Usually Based On Inference, Not Unvarnished Observation (you Don't See Electrons, Gravity, Or Black Holes Either).

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.

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 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.

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.

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

I'm Not A Great Deductive Thinker, But I Will Admit To Having Competence In A Very Wide Range Of Things - Not Being Afraid To Try To Write About Baseball, Choral Music And Dinosaurs In The Same Week And See Connections Among Them.

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

The Modern Theory Of Evolution Does Not Require Gradual Change. It In Fact, The Operation Of Darwinian Processes Should Yield Exactly What We See In The Fossil Record. It Is Gradualism That We Must Reject, Not Darwinism.

Theory Of Evolution

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The World, Unfortunately, Rarely Matches Our Hopes And Consistently Refuses To Behave In A Reasonable Manner.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm.

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

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

Changing Environment

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The True Beauty Of Nature Is Her Amplitude; She Exists Neither For Nor Because Of Us, And Possesses A Staying Power That All Our Nuclear Arsenals Cannot Threaten (much As We Can Easily Destroy Our Puny Selves).

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.

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

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.

At A Minimum, In Explaining Evolutionary Pathways Through Time, The Constraints Imposed By History Rise To Equal Prominence With The Immediate Advantages Of Adaptation.

The Dogmatist Within Is Always Worse Than The Enemy Without.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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