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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.
-Stephen Jay Gould
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Unfortunately, All Life On

Stephen Jay Gould
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.
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Topic
Real
Order
Judgement
More From Stephen Jay Gould
Contrary To Current Cynicism About Past Golden Ages, The Abstraction Known As 'the Intelligent Layperson' Does Exist - In The Form Of Millions Of Folks With A Passionate Commitment To Continuous Learning.
Commitment
Intelligent
Past
The Oppressive Weight Of Disaster And Tragedy In Our Lives Does Not Arise From A High Percentage Of Evil Among The Summed Total Of All Acts, But From The Extraordinary Power Of Exceedingly Rare Incidents Of Depravity To Inflict Catastrophic Damage, Especially In Our Technological Age When Airplanes Can Become Powerful Bombs. (an Even More Evil Man, Armed Only With A Longbow, Could Not Have Wreaked Such Havoc At The Battle Of Agincourt In 1415.)
Powerful
Airplane
Men
Complex Organisms Cannot Be Construed As The Sum Of Their Genes, Nor Do Genes Alone Build Particular Items Of Anatomy Or Behavior By Themselves. Most Genes Influence Several Aspects Of Anatomy And Behavior As They Operate Through Complex Interactions With Other Genes And Their Products, And With Environmental Factors Both Within And Outside The Developing Organism. We Fall Into A Deep Error, Not Just A Harmful Oversimplification, When We Speak Of Genes "for" Particular Items Of Anatomy Or Behavior.
Fall
Errors
Interaction With Others
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.
Couple
Years
Land
If There Is Any Consistent Enemy Of Science, It Is Not Religion, But Irrationalism.
Enemy
Consistent
Ifs
The Causes Of Life's History [cannot] Resolve The Riddle Of Life's Meaning.
Causes
Riddle
Resolve
We Live In A Profoundly Nonintellectual Culture, Made All The Worse By A Passive Hedonism Abetted By The Spread Of Wealth And Its Dissipation Into Countless Electronic Devices That Impart The Latest In Entertainment And Supposed Information - All In Short (and Loud) Doses Of "easy Listening".
Listening
Culture
Information
I Contend That The Continued Racial Classification Of Homo Sapiens Represents An Outmoded Approach To The General Problem Of Differentiation Within A Species. In Other Words, I Reject A Racial Classification Of Humans For The Same Reasons That I Prefer Not To Divide Into Subspecies The Prodigiously Variable West Indian Land Snails That Form The Subject Of My Own Research.
Land
Differentiation
Research
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.
Block
Design
Progress
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.
Pain
Cancer
Men
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.
Angel
Numbers
House
I Am Not, Personally, A Believer Or A Religious Man In Any Sense Of Institutional Commitment Or Practice. But I Have A Great Respect For Religion, And The Subject Has Always Fascinated Me, Beyond Almost All Others (with A Few Exceptions, Like Evolution And Paleontology).
Religious
Commitment
Science
The Most Erroneous Stories Are Those We Think We Know Best - And Therefore Never Scrutinize Or Question.
Science
Thinking
Fog
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.
Opposites
Issues
Opponents
The Basic Formulation, Or Bare-bones Mechanics, Of Natural Selection Is A Disarmingly Simple Argument, Based On Three Undeniable Facts (overproduction Of Offspring, Variation, And Heritability) And One Syllogistic Inference (natural Selection, Or The Claim That Organisms Enjoying Differential Reproductive Success Will, On Average, Be Those Variants That Are Fortuitously Better Adapted To Changing Local Environments, And That These Variants Will Then Pass Their Favored Traits To Offspring By Inheritance).
Simple
Average
Atheism
As In 1925, Creationists Are Not Battling For Religion. They Have Been Disowned By Leading Church Men Of All Persuasions, For They Debase Religion Even More Than They Misconstrue Science. They Are A Motley Collection To Be Sure, But Their Core Of Practical Support Lies With The Evangelical Right, And Creationism Is A Mere Stalking Horse Or Subsidiary Issue In A Political Program...the Enemy Is Not Fundamentalism; It Is Intolerance. In This Case, The Intolerance Is Perverse Since It Masquerades Under The 'liberal' Rhetoric Of 'equal Time'.
Horse
Lying
Men
True Majorities, In A Tv-dominated And Anti-intellectual Age, May Need Sound Bites And Flashing Lights And I Am Not Against Supplying Such Lures If They Draw Children Into Even A Transient Concern With Science. But Every Classroom Has One [oliver] Sacks , One [eric] Korn, Or One [jonathan] Miller , Usually A Lonely Child With A Passionate Curiosity About Nature, And A Zeal That Overcomes Pressures For Conformity. Do Not The One In Fifty Deserve Their Institutions As Well Magic Places, Like Cabinet Museums, That Can Spark The Rare Flames Of Genius?
Lonely
Children
Museums
Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?
The Equation Of Evolution With Progress Represents Our Strongest Cultural Impediment To A Proper Understanding Of This Greatest Biological Revolution In The History Of Human Thought.
Science
Understanding
Progress
I Love The Wry Motto Of The Paleontological Society, Meant Both Literally And Figuratively, For Hammers Are The Main Tool Of Our Trade: Frango Ut Patefaciam - I Break In Order To Reveal.
Order
Hammers
Tools
No Geologist Worth Anything Is Permanently Bound To A Desk Or Laboratory, But The Charming Notion That True Science Can Only Be Based On Unbiased Observation Of Nature In The Raw Is Mythology. Creative Work, In Geology And Anywhere Else, Is Interaction And Synthesis: Half-baked Ideas From A Bar Room, Rocks In The Field, Chains Of Thought From Lonely Walks, Numbers Squeezed From Rocks In A Laboratory, Numbers From A Calculator Riveted To A Desk, Fancy Equipment Usually Malfunctioning On Expensive Ships, Cheap Equipment In The Human Cranium, Arguments Before A Road Cut.
Lonely
Creativity
Science
When We Look To Presumed Sources Of Origin For Competing Evolutionary Explanations Of The Giraffe's Long Neck, We Find Either Nothing At All, Or Only The Shortest Of Speculative Conjectures. Length, Of Course, Need Not Correspond With Importance. Garrulous Old Polonius , In A Rare Moment Of Clarity, Reminded Us That "brevity Is The Soul Of Wit" (and Then Immediately Vitiated His Wise Observation With A Flood Of Woolly Words About Hamlet 's Madness.
Wise
Long
Soul
The Great Merit Of Stephen Gould's Account Of The Disastrous History Of Phychometrics Is That He Shifts The Argument From A Sterile Contest Between Environmentalists And Hereditarians And Turns It Into An Argument Between Those Who Are Impressed With What Our Biology Stops Us Doing And Those Who Are Impressed With What It Allows Us To Do.
Merit
Argument
Biology
Siphonophores Do Not Convey The Message A Favorite Theme Of Unthinking Romanticism That Nature Is But One Gigantic Whole, All Its Parts Intimately Connected And Interacting In Some Higher, Ineffable Harmony. Nature Revels In Boundaries And Distinctions; We Inhabit A Universe Of Structure. But Since Our Universe Of Structure Has Evolved Historically, It Must Present Us With Fuzzy Boundaries, Where One Kind Of Thing Grades Into Another.
Messages
Fuzzy
Kind
If Genius Has Any Common Denominator, I Would Propose Breadth Of Interest And The Ability To Construct Fruitful Analogies Between Fields.
Genius
Analogies
Fields
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.
Beach
Morning
Science
I Am, Somehow, Less Interested In The Weight And Convolutions Of Einstein’s Brain Than In The Near Certainty That People Of Equal Talent Have Lived And Died In Cotton Fields And Sweatshops.
Peace
Interesting
People
In His Anti-darwinian Book... (and Eponymously Named The Neck Of The Giraffe ), Francis Hitching Tells The Story... "the Need To Survive By Reaching Ever Higher For Food Is, Like So Many Darwinian Explanations Of Its Kind, Little More Than A Post Hoc Speculation." Hitching Is Quite Correct, But He Rebuts A Fairy Story That Darwin Was Far Too Smart To Tell - Even Though The Tale Later Entered Our High School Texts As A "classic Case" Nonetheless.
Smart
Book
School
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.
Beautiful
Flower
Orchids
Orchids Were Not Made By An Ideal Engineer; They Are Jury-rigged From A Limited Set Of Available Components.
Orchids
Evolution
Made
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.
Horse
Goal
Long
Natural Selection Is Just Three Factors - Over-production, Variation, And Inheritance Combined To Produce Adaptation To Changing Local Environments. It's Not A Principle Or Progress; It's Just A Principle Of Local Adaptation. You Don't Make Better Creatures In Any Cosmic Sense; You Make Creatures That Are Better Suited To The Changing Climates Of Their Local Habitats.
Progress
Climate
Principles
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.
Groups
Events
Looks
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?
Views
Evolution
Adaptation
The Facts Of Nature Are What They Are, But We Can Only View Them Through The Spectacles Of Our Mind. Our Mind Works Largely By Metaphor And Comparison, Not Always (or Often) By Relentless Logic. When We Are Caught In Conceptual Traps, The Best Exit Is Often A Change In Metaphor Not Because The New Guideline Will Be Truer To Nature (for Neither The Old Nor The New Metaphor Lies "out There" In The Woods), But Because We Need A Shift To More Fruitful Perspectives, And Metaphor Is Often The Best Agent Of Conceptual Transition.
Lying
Views
Perspective
Our Searches For Numerical Order Lead As Often To Terminal Nuttiness As To Profound Insight.
Order
Profound
Insight
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.
People
Political
Tools
I Was Lucky To Wander Into Evolutionary Theory, One Of The Most Exciting And Important Of All Scientific Fields. I Had Never Heard Of It When I Started At A Rather Tender Age; I Was Simply Awed By Dinosaurs. I Thought Paleontologists Spent Their Lives Digging Up Bones And Putting Them Together, Never Venturing Beyond The Momentous Issue Of What Connects To What. Then I Discovered Evolutionary Theory. Ever Since Then, The Duality Of Natural History-richness In Particularities And Potential Union In Underlying Explanation-has Propelled Me.
Issues
Important
Atheism
Darwin's Principle Of Natural Selection Leads To The Prediction That The Proper Way To Analyze Any Evolutionary Development Is To See The New Features As Adaptive To Environments. And That's A Perfectly Good Principle. The Problem Is That There Are Many Evolutionary Biologists Who View Everything That Happens In Evolution As Directly Evolved For Adaptive Benefit. And That Just Doesn't Work. Whenever You Build A Structure For Adaptive Reasons, The Structure Is Going To Exhibit Properties That Have Nothing To Do With Adaptation. They're Just Side Consequences.
Evolution
Problem
Environment
Life Is A Copiously Branching Bush, Continually Pruned By The Grim Reaper Of Extinction, Not A Ladder Of Predictable Progress.
Life
Science
Progress
We Pass Through This World But Once.
Kindness
Helping Others
Giving
The Pathways That Have Led To Our Evolution Are Quirky, Improbable, Unrepeatable And Utterly Unpredictable.
Quirky
Pathways
Evolution
Scientists Have Power By Virtue Of The Respect Commanded By The Discipline... We Live With Poets And Politicians, Preachers And Philosophers. All Have Their Ways Of Knowing, And All Are Valid In Their Proper Domain. The World Is Too Complex And Interesting For One Way To Hold All The Answers.
Knowing
Discipline
Interesting
[in Natural History,] Great Discovery Often Requires A Map To A Hidden Mine Filled With Gems Then Easily Gathered By Conventional Tools, Not A Shiny New Space-age Machine For Penetrating Previously Inaccessible Worlds.
Space
Discovery
Age
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.
Issues
Interesting
Expectations
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.
Important
Legends
Fierce
Darwinian Evolution May Be The Most Truthful And Powerful Idea Ever Generated By Western Science, But If We Continue To Illustrate Our Conviction With An Indefensible, Unsupported, Entirely Speculative, And Basically Rather Silly Story, Then We Are Clothing A Thing Of Beauty In Rags - And We Should Be Ashamed, "for The Apparel Oft Proclaims The Man.
Powerful
Silly
Men
Paleontologists [fossil Experts] Have Paid An Exorbitant Price For Darwin's Argument. We Fancy Ourselves As The Only True Students Of Life's History, Yet To Preserve Our Favored Account Of Evolution By Natural Selection We View Our Data As So Bad That We Almost Never See The Very Process We Profess To Study.
Views
Data
Fancy
I'm Not A Great Deductive Thinker, But I Will Admit To Having Competence In A Very Wide Range Of Things - Not Being Afraid To Try To Write About Baseball, Choral Music And Dinosaurs In The Same Week And See Connections Among Them.
Baseball
Writing
Trying
Each Of The Major Sciences Has Contributed An Essential Ingredient In Our Long Retreat From An Initial Belief In Our Own Cosmic Importance. Astronomy Defined Our Home As A Small Planet Tucked Away In One Corner Of An Average Galaxy Among Millions; Biology Took Away Our Status As Paragons Created In The Image Of God; Geology Gave Us The Immensity Of Time And Taught Us How Little Of It Our Own Species Has Occupied.
Home
Average
Taught Us
Evolution Is A Process Of Constant Branching And Expansion.
Expansion
Evolution
Process
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.
Order
Dull
Causes
It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary Biologist To Write About Extinction Caused By Human Stupidity. Let Me Then Float An Unconventional Plea, The Inverse Of The Usual Argument. The Extinction Of Partula Is Unfair To Partula. That Is The Conventional Argument, And I Do Not Challenge Its Primacy. But We Need A Humanistic Ecology As Well, Both For The Practical Reason That People Will Always Touch People More Than Snails Do Or Can, And For The Moral Reason That Humans Are Legitimately The Measure Of All Ethical Questions For These Are Our Issues, Not Nature's.
Writing
Issues
Ethical Questions
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.
Children
White
Race
Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview - Nothing More Constraining, More Blinding To Innovation, More Destructive Of Openness To Novelty.
Innovation
Religion
Novelty
We Must [it Has Been Arued] Go Beyond Reductionism To A Holistic Recognition That Biology And Culture Interpenetrate In An Inextricable Manner.
Culture
Recognition
Biology
World Views Are Social Constructions And They Channel The Search For Facts. But Facts Are Found And Knowledge Progresses, However Fitfully.
Views
Perception
Progress
We Can Now Determine, Easily And Relatively Cheaply, The Detailed Chemical Architecture Of Genes ; And We Can Trace The Products Of These Genes ( Enzymes And Proteins ) As They Influence The Course Of Embryology . In So Doing We Have Made The Astounding Discovery That All Complex Animal Phyla - Arthropods And Vertebrates In Particular - Have Retained, Despite Their Half-billion Years Of Evolutionary Independence, An Extensive Set Of Common Genetic Blueprints For Building Bodies.
Animal
Discovery
Years
Eternal Vigilance, As They Say, Is The Price Of Freedom. Add Intellectual Integrity To The Cost Basis.
Integrity
Intellectual
Add
Most Books, After All, Are Ephemeral; Their Specifics, Several Years Later, Inspire About As Much Interest As Daily Battle Reports From The Hundred Years' War.
War
Book
Years
At A Minimum, In Explaining Evolutionary Pathways Through Time, The Constraints Imposed By History Rise To Equal Prominence With The Immediate Advantages Of Adaptation.
Pathways
Adaptation
Advantage
Iconography Becomes Even More Revealing When Processes Or Concepts, Rather Than Objects, Must Be Depicted For The Constraint Of A Definite "thing" Cedes Directly To The Imagination. How Can We Draw "evolution" Or "social Organization," Not To Mention The More Mundane "digestion" Or "self-interest," Without Portraying More Of A Mental Structure Than A Physical Reality? If We Wish To Trace The History Of Ideas, Iconography Becomes A Candid Camera Trained Upon The Scholar's Mind.
Reality
Self
Organization
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.
Views
Long
Misunderstood
An Old Paleontological In Joke Proclaims That Mammalian Evolution Is A Tale Told By Teeth Mating To Produce Slightly Altered Descendant Teeth.
Teeth
Evolution
Tales
In The Great Debates Of Early-nineteenth Century Geology, Catastrophists Followed The Stereotypical Method Of Objective Science-empirical Literalism. They Believed What They Saw, Interpolated Nothing, And Read The Record Of The Rocks Directly.
Science
Rocks
Records
Nature Is What She Is - Amoral And Persistent.
Nature
Ecology
Persistent
As A Graduate Student At Columbia University, I Remember The A Priori Derision Of My Distinguished Stratigraphy Professor Toward A Visiting Australian Drifter [a Supporter Of The Theory Of Continental Drift]. Today My Own Students Would Dismiss With Even More Derision Anyone Who Denied The Evident Truth Of Continental Drift - A Prophetic Madman Is At Least Amusing; A Superannuated Fuddy-duddy Is Merely Pitiful.
Today
Students
Graduates
A Man Does Not Attain The Status Of Galileo Merely Because He Is Persecuted; He Must Also Be Right.
Science
Men
Doe
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.
Religion
Evolution
Nonsense
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.
Real
Order
Judgement
History Employs Evolution To Structure Biological Events In Time.
Time
Science
History
I Hardly Recognize What I Do Well. I Just Do It.
Subconscious
Wells
Just Do It
Goethe Died In 1832. As You Know, Goethe Was Very Active In Science. In Fact, He Did Some Very Good Scientific Work In Plant Morphology And Mineralogy. But He Was Quite Bitter At The Way In Which Many Scientists Refused To Grant Him A Hearing Because He Was A Poet And Therefore, They Felt, He Couldn't Be Serious.
Facts
Serious
Way
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.
Meaningful
Lying
Believe
In Their Recently Aborted Struggle To Inject Genesis Literalism Into Science Classrooms, Fundamentalist Groups Followed Their Usual Opportunistic Strategy Of Arguing Two Contradictory Sides Of A Question When A Supposed Rhetorical Advantage Could Be Extracted From Each.
Struggle
Two
Usual
Human Life Is The Result Of A Glorious Evolutionary Accident.
Religion
Atheism
Life Is
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.
Roles
Earth
May
Honorable Errors Do Not Count As Failures In Science, But As Seeds For Progress In The Quintessential Activity Of Correction.
Failure
Science
Errors
The Silliest And Most Tendentious Of Baseball Writing Tries To Wrest Profundity From The Spectacle Of Grown Men Hitting A Ball With A Stick By Suggesting Linkages Between The Sport And Deep Issues Of Morality, Parenthood, History, Lost Innocence, Gentleness, And So On, Seemingly Ad Infinitum . (the Effort Reeks Of Silliness Because Baseball Is Profound All By Itself And Needs No Excuses; People Who Don't Know This Are Not Fans And Are Therefore Unreachable Anyway.
Sports
Baseball
Writing
I Like To Summarize What I Regard As The Pedestal-smashing Messages Of Darwin's Revolution In The Following Statement, Which Might Be Chanted Several Times A Day, Like A Hare Krishna Mantra, To Encourage Penetration Into The Soul: Humans Are Not The End Result Of Predictable Evolutionary Progress, But Rather A Fortuitous Cosmic Afterthought, A Tiny Little Twig On The Enormously Arborescent Bush Of Life, Which, If Replanted From Seed, Would Almost Surely Not Grow This Twig Again, Or Perhaps Any Twig With Any Property That We Would Care To Call Consciousness.
Soul
Progress
Pedestal
The History Of Life Is More Adequately Represented By A Picture Of 'punctuated Equilibria' Than By The Notion Of Phyletic Gradualism. The History Of Evolution Is Not One Of Stately Unfolding, But A Story Of Homeostatic Equilibria, Disturbed Only 'rarely' (i.e. Rather Often In The Fullness Of Time) By Rapid And Episodic Events Of Speciation.
Events
Stories
History Of Life
What You See Is That The Most Outstanding Feature Of Life's History Is A Constant Domination By Bacteria.
Bacteria
Outstanding
Domination
'creation Science' Has Not Entered The Curriculum For A Reason So Simple And So Basic That We Often Forget To Mention It: Because It Is False, And Because Good Teachers Understand Exactly Why It Is False.
Teacher
Simple
Creation Science
The Darwinian Revolution Is About Essence. The Darwinian Revolution Is About Who We Are, It's What We're Made Of, It's What Our Life Means Insofar As Science Can Answer That Question.
Mean
Essence
Answers
Rifkin's Assertions Bear No Relationship To What I Have Observed And Practiced For 25 Years ... Either I Am Blind Or He Is Wrong - And I Think I Can Show, By Analyzing His Slipshod Scholarship And Basic Misunderstanding Of Science, That His World Is An Invention Constructed To Validate His Own Private Hopes ... Rifkin Shows No Understanding Of The Norms And Procedures Of Science: He Displays Little Comprehension Of What Science Is And How Scientists Work.
Thinking
Years
Understanding
All Evolutionary Biologists Know That Variation Itself Is Nature's Only Irreducible Essence... I Had To Place Myself Amidst The Variation.
Essence
Variation
Biologist
All Science Is Intelligent Inference; Excessive Literalism Is Delusion, Not A Humble Bowing To Evidence.
Humble
Intelligent
Statistics
Memory Is A Fascinating Trickster. Words And Images Have Enormous Power And Can Easily Displace Actual Experience Over The Years.
Memories
Years
Enormous
When Scientists Need To Explain Difficult Points Of Theory, Illustration By Hypothetical Example - Rather Than By Total Abstraction - Works Well (perhaps Indispensably) As A Rhetorical Device. Such Cases Do Not Function As Speculations In The Pejorative Sense - As Silly Stories That Provide Insight Into Complex Mechanisms - But Rather As Idealized Illustrations To Exemplify A Difficult Point Of Theory. (other Fields, Like Philosophy And The Law, Use Such Conjectural Cases As A Standard Device.
Philosophy
Silly
Law
The Median Isn't The Message.
Messages
Statistician
Median
Throughout His Last Half-dozen Books, For Example, Arthur Koestler Has Been Conducting A Campaign Against His Own Misunderstanding Of Darwinism. He Hopes To Find Some Ordering Force, Constraining Evolution To Certain Directions And Overriding The Influence Of Natural Selection. [...] Darwinism Is Not The Theory Of Capricious Change That Koestler Imagines. Random Variation May Be The Raw Material Of Change, But Natural Selection Builds Good Design By Rejecting Most Variants While Accepting And Accumulating The Few That Improve Adaptation To Local Environments.
Book
Design
Example
The Essence Of Darwinism Lies In Its Claim That Natural Selection Creates The Fit. Variation Is Ubiquitous And Random In Direction. It Supplies Raw Material Only. Natural Selection Directs The Course Of Evolutionary Change.
Lying
Essence
Raw Materials
Life Shows No Trend To Complexity In The Usual Sense-only An Asymmetrical Expansion Of Diversity Around A Starting Point Constrained To Be Simple.
Life
Simple
Diversity
[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.
Brother
Powerful
Dad
Few Intellectual Tyrannies Can Be More Recalcitrant Than The Truths That Everybody Knows And Nearly No One Can Defend With Any Decent Data (for Who Needs Proof Of Anything So Obvious). And Few Intellectual Activities Can Be More Salutary Than Attempts To Find Out Whether These Rocks Of Ages Might Crumble At The Slightest Tap Of An Informational Hammer.
Data
Rocks
Intellectual
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.
Biblical
Order
Years
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.
Thinking
Psychics
People
Science Is Not 'organized Common Sense'; At Its Most Exciting, It Reformulates Our View Of The World By Imposing Powerful Theories Against The Ancient, Anthropocentric Prejudices That We Call Intuition.
Powerful
Views
Common Sense
The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm.
Science
Evolution
Paradigm
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.
Thinking
Self
Robots
It Is The Things We Think We Know - Because They Are So Elementary Or Because They Surround Us - That Often Present The Greatest Difficulties When We Are Actually Challenged To Explain Them.
Thinking
Difficulty
Knows
If We Choose A Weak And Foolish Speculation As A Primary Textbook Illustration (falsely Assuming That The Tale Possesses A Weight Of History And A Sanction Of Evidence), Then We Are In For Trouble - As Critics Properly Nail The Particular Weakness, And Then Assume That The Whole Theory Must Be In Danger If Supporters Choose Such A Fatuous Case As A Primary Illustration.
Illustration
Weakness
Nails
I Am Not [...] Asserting That Humans Are Either Genial Or Aggressive By Inborn Biological Necessity. Obviously, Both Kindness And Violence Lie Within The Bounds Of Our Nature Because We Perpetrate Both, In Spades. I Only Advance A Structural Claim That Social Stability Rules Nearly All The Time And Must Be Based On An Overwhelmingly Predominant (but Tragically Ignored) Frequency Of Genial Acts, And That Geniality Is Therefore Our Usual And Preferred Response Nearly All The Time. [...] [t]he Center Of Human Nature Is Rooted In Ten Thousand Ordinary Acts Of Kindness That Define Our Days.
Kindness
Lying
Usual
People Talk About Human Intelligence As The Greatest Adaptation In The History Of The Planet. It Is An Amazing And Marvelous Thing, But In Evolutionary Terms, It Is As Likely To Do Us In As To Help Us Along.
People
Helping
Adaptation
Science Is An Integral Part Of Culture. It's Not This Foreign Thing, Done By An Arcane Priesthood. It's One Of The Glories Of The Human Intellectual Tradition.
Science
Intellectual
Culture
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.
World
Evolution
Fit
The Fundamentalists, By 'knowing' The Answers Before They Start, And Then Forcing Nature Into The Straitjacket Of Their Discredited Preconceptions, Lie Outside The Domain Of Science - Or Any Honest Intellectual Inquiry.
Lying
Knowing
Intellectual
You Put Three Facts Together - That All Organisms Produce More Offspring That Can Survive, That There's Variation Among Organisms, And That At Least Some Of That Variation Is Inherited - And The Syllogistic Inference Is Natural Selection.
Together
Three
Variation
The Literal Record Was Not A Hopelessly And Imperfect Fraction Of Truly Insensible Gradation Within Large Populations But An Accurate Reflection Of The Actual Process Identified By Evolutionists As The Chief Motor Of Biological Change. The Theory Of Punctuated Equilibrium Was, In Its Initial Formulation, Little More Than This Insight Adumbrated.
Reflection
Population
Records
The Only Universal Attribute Of Scientific Statements Resides In Their Potential Fallibility. If A Claim Cannot Be Disproven, It Does Not Belong To The Enterprise Of Science.
Doe
Claims
Attributes
When People Learn No Tools Of Judgment And Merely Follow Their Hopes, The Seeds Of Political Manipulation Are Sown.
People
Political
Religion
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.
Past
Lucky
Get Money
Not Since The Lord Himself Showed His Stuff To Ezekiel In The Valley Of Dry Bones Had Anyone Brought Such Grace And Skill To The Reconstruction Of Animals From Disarticulated Skeletons. Charles R. Knight, Most Celebrated Of Artists In The Reanimation Of Fossils, Painted All The Canonical Figures Of Dinosaurs That Fire Our Fear And Imagination To This Day.
Science
Artist
Animal
So Much Of Science Proceeds By Telling Stories.
Stories
Telling Stories
The Vigorous Branching Of Life's Tree, And Not The Accumulating Valor Of Mythical Marches To Progress, Lies Behind The Persistence And Expansion Of Organic Diversity In Our Tough And Constantly Stressful World. And If We Do Not Grasp The Fundamental Nature Of Branching As The Key To Life's Passage Across The Geological Stage, We Will Never Understand Evolution Aright.
Lying
Persistence
Keys
Charles Darwin Viewed The Fossil Record More As An Embarrassment Than As An Aid To His Theory.
Records
Fossils
Evolution
If I Have Any Insight At All To Contribute It Is This: Find Out What You Are Really Good At And Stick To It.
Sticks
Talent
Insight
Can I Pay Any Higher Tribute To A Man [george Gaylord Simpson] Than To State That His Work Both Established A Profession And Sowed The Seeds For Its Own Revision? If Simpson Had Reached Final Truth, He Either Would Have Been A Priest Or Would Have Chosen A Dull Profession. The History Of Life Cannot Be A Dull Profession.
Life
Science
Men
Great Theories Are Expansive; Failures Mire Us In Dogmatism And Tunnel Vision.
Tunnels
Vision
Dogmatism
We Build Our Personalities Laboriously And Through Many Years, And We Cannot Order Fundamental Changes Just Because We Might Value Their Utility; No Button Reading "positive Attitude" Protrudes From Our Hearts, And No Finger Can Coerce Positivity Into Immediate Action By A Single And Painless Pressing.
Attitude
Reading
Heart
The History Of Life Is A Tale Of Decimation And Later Stabilization Of Few Surviving Anatomies, Not A Story Of Steady Expansion And Progress.
Life
Progress
Expansion
It's True That The Level Of Scientific Knowledge Among Adults Is Very Low, But That's Not Because There Isn't A Natural Interest. I Think Most Kids Are Fascinated By The Natural World. I've Often Said That If You Could Quantify The Mental Power Involved In All The Dinosaur Names Correctly Known And Correctly Spelled By 5-year-old Kids In America, You Could Move Any Mountain On Earth.
Moving
Kids
Thinking
Objectivity Cannot Be Equated With Mental Blankness; Rather, Objectivity Resides In Recognizing Your Preferences And Then Subjecting Them To Especially Harsh Scrutiny - And Also In A Willingness To Revise Or Abandon Your Theories When The Tests Fail (as They Usually Do).
Objectivity
Tests
Failing
Evolution Is An Inference From Thousands Of Independent Sources, The Only Conceptual Structure That Can Make Unified Sense Of All This Disparate Information.
Independent
Science
Information
If You Defend A Behavior By Arguing That People Are Programmed Directly For It, Then How Do You Continue To Defend It If Your Speculation Is Wrong, For The Behavior Then Becomes Unnatural And Worthy Of Condemnation. Better To Stick Resolutely To A Philosophical Position On Human Liberty: What Free Adults Do With Each Other In Their Own Private Lives Is Their Business Alone. It Need Not Be Vindicated And Must Not Be Condemned By Genetic Speculation.
Philosophical
People
Liberty
The Myriad Valleys Could Have Arisen Anywhere On The Landscape. The Current Positions Are Quite Accidental. If We Could Repeat The Experiment, We Might Obtain No Valleys At All, Or A Completely Different System. Yet We Now Stand At The Shore Line Contemplating The Fine Spacing Of Valleys And Their Even Contact With The Sea. How Easy It Is To Be Misled And To Assume That No Other Landscape Could Possibly Have Arisen.
Sea
Different
Valleys
The Telephone Is The Greatest Single Enemy Of Scholarship; For What Our Intellectual Forebears Used To Inscribe In Ink Now Goes Once Over A Wire Into Permanent Oblivion.
Humorous
Phones
Intellectual
Acquired Characteristics Are Inherited In Technology And Culture. Lamarckian Evolution Is Rapid And Accumulative. It Explains The Cardinal Difference Between Our Past, Purely Biological Mode Of Change, And Our Current, Maddening Acceleration Toward Something New And Liberating- Or Toward The Abyss.
Past
Technology
Differences
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.
Brain
Survival
Essentials
A Rare Book At Once Of Great Importance And Wonderful To Read.... Gould Presents A Fascinating Historical Study Of Scientific Racism, Tracing It Through Monogeny And Polygeny, Phrenology , Recapitulation, And Hereditarian Iq Theory. He Stops At Each Point To Illustrate Both The Logical Inconsistencies Of The Theories And The Prejudicially Motivated, Albeit Unintentional, Misuse Of Data In Each Case.... A Major Addition To The Scientific Literature.
Book
Data
Racism
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.
Generations
Paleontology
Fields
Still, Our Creationist Incubi, Who Would Never Let Facts Spoil A Favorite Argument, Refuse To Yield, And Continue To Assert The Absence Of All Transitional Forms By Ignoring Those That Have Been Found, And Continuing To Taunt Us With Admittedly Frequent Examples Of Absence.
Yield
Example
Facts
... Each With Its Own Beauty, And Each With A Story To Tell.
Beauty
Stories
Evolution
Very Little Comes Easily To Our Poor, Benighted Species (the First Creature, After All, To Experiment With The Novel Evolutionary Inventions Of Self-conscious Philosophy And Art). Even The Most "obvious," "accurate," And "natural" Style Of Thinking Or Drawing Must Be Regulated By History And Won By Struggle. Solutions Must Therefore Arise Within A Social Context And Record The Complex Interactions Of Mind And Environment That Define The Possibility Of Human Improvement.
Art
Philosophy
Struggle
...we Must Be Wary Of Granting Too Much Power To Natural Selection By Viewing All Basic Capacities Of Our Brain As Direct Adaptations.
Brain
Too Much Power
Adaptation
No Rational Order Of Divine Intelligence Unites Species. The Natural Ties Are Genealogical Along Contingent Pathways Of History.
Order
Ties
Religion
Change Is More Often A Rapid Transition Between Two Stable States Than A Continuous Transformation At Slow And Steady Rates. . . .change Occurs In Large Leaps Following A Slow Accumulation Of Stress That A System Resists Until It Reaches The Breaking Point. Heat Water, And It Eventually Boils. Oppress The Workers More And More And Bring On The Revolution.
Stress
Two
Point Break
The Board Transported Its Jurisdiction To A Never-never Land Where A Dorothy Of The New Millennium Might Exclaim: "they Still Call It Kansas, But I Don't Think We're In The Real World Anymore."
Real
Thinking
Land
If We Make This Readjustment To View Homo Sapiens As An Ultimate In Oddball Rarity, And Life At Bacterial Grade As The Common Expression Of A Universal Phenomenon, Then We Could Finally Ask The Truly Fundamental Question Raised By The Prospect Of Martian Fossils. If Life Originates As A General Property Of The Material Universe Under Certain Conditions (probably Often Realized), Then How Much Can The Basic Structure And Constitution Of Life Vary From Place To Independent Place?
Independent
Views
Expression
The Invalid Assumption That Correlation Implies Cause Is Probably Among The Two Or Three Most Serious And Common Errors Of Human Reasoning.
Two
Errors
Religion
The Proof Of Evolution Lies In Those Adaptations That Arise From Improbable Foundations.
Lying
Foundation
Evolution
Obsolescence Is A Fate Devoutly To Be Wished, Lest Science Stagnate And Die.
Fate
Obsolescence
Dies
I Emphatically Do Not Assert The General 'truth' Of This Philosophy Of Punctuational Change. Any Attempt To Support The Exclusive Validity Of Such A Grandiose Notion Would Border On The Nonsensical.
Philosophy
Support
Borders
All Organisms Vary, And It's Just Folk Knowledge. You Just Have To Look Around A Room Of People, And Everybody Knows That It's True. Darwin Didn't Know The Mechanism Of Heredity, But You Don't Have To. You Just Need To Know The Fact Of It.
People
Needs
Looks
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.
Feelings
Confusing
World
Among People I Have Met, The Few Whom I Would Term “great” All Share A Kind Of Unquestioned, Fierce Dedication; An Utter Lack Of Doubt About The Value Of Their Activities (or At Least An Internal Impulse That Drives Through Any Such Angst); And Above All, A Capacity To Work (or At Least To Be Mentally Alert For Unexpected Insights) At Every Available Moment Of Every Day Of Their Lives.
Life
Work
Dedication
We Are Storytelling Animals, And Cannot Bear To Acknowledge The Ordinariness Of Our Daily Lives.
Animal
Bears
Daily Life
Humans Arose ... As A Fortuitous And Contingent Outcome Of Thousands Of Linked Events, Any One Of Which Could Have Occurred Differently And Sent History On An Alternative Pathway That Would Not Have Led To Consciousness.
Pathways
Events
Alternatives
We Debase The Richness Of Both Nature And Our Own Minds If We View The Great Pageant Of Our Intellectual History As A Compendium Of New Information Leading From Primal Superstition To Final Exactitude. We Know That The Sun Is Hub Of Our Little Corner Of The Universe, And That Ties Of Genealogy Connect All Living Things On Our Planet, Because These Theories Assemble And Explain So Much Otherwise Disparate And Unrelated Information Not Because Galileo Trained His Telescope On The Moons Of Jupiter Or Because Darwin Took A Ride On A Galápagos Tortoise.
Moon
Views
Ties
Creation Science Has Not Entered The Curriculum For A Reason So Simple And So Basic That We Often Forget To Mention It: Because It Is False, And Because Good Teachers Understand Why It Is False. What Could Be More Destructive Of That Most Fragile Yet Most Precious Commodity In Our Entire Intellectual Heritage-good Teaching-than A Bill Forcing Our Honorable Teachers To Sully Their Sacred Trust By Granting Equal Treatment To A Doctrine Not Only Known To Be False, But Calculated To Undermine Any General Understanding Of Science As An Enterprise?.
Teacher
Teaching
Science
I Am Glad That The Life Of Pandas Is So Dull By Human Standards, For Our Efforts At Conservation Have Little Moral Value If We Preserve Creatures Only As Human Ornaments; I Shall Be Impressed When We Show Solicitude For Warty Toads And Slithering Worms.
Effort
Ornaments
Pandas
The World Is Too Complex For Subsumption Under Any General Theory Of Change.
World
Theory
Complexes
The Origin Of Homo Sapiens, As A Tiny Twig On An Improbable Branch Of A Contingent Limb On A Fortunate Tree, Lies Well Below The Boundary.
Tree
Branches
Tiny
[t]he Effects Of General Change [in Literature] Are Most Tellingly Recorded Not In Alteration Of The Best Products, But In The Transformation Of The Most Ordinary Workaday Books; For When Potboilers Adopt The New Style, Then The Revolution Is Complete.
Book
Style
Ordinary
No One Should Feel At All Offended Or Threatened By The Obvious Fact That We Are Not All Born Entirely Blank, Or Entirely The Same, In Our Mixture Of The Broad Behavioral Propensities Defining What We Call "temperament".
Mixtures
Facts
Defining
Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.
Groups
Paleontology
Levels
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.
Atheism
Cosmic
Fortuitous
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.
Clever
People
One Liner
For Dawkins, Evolution Is A Battle Among Genes, Each Seeking To Make More Copies Of Itself. Bodies Are Merely The Places Where Genes Aggregate For A Time.
Battle
Body
Evolution
Ordinary Speciation Remains Fully Adequate To Explain The Causes And Phenomenology Of Punctuation.
Ordinary
Phenomenology
Adequate
Perhaps I Am Just A Hopeless Rationalist, But Isn't Fascination As Comforting As Solace? Isn't Nature Immeasurably More Interesting For Its Complexities And Its Lack Of Conformity To Our Hopes? Isn't Curiosity As Wondrously And Fundamentally Human As Compassion?
Nature
Compassion
Interesting
Since The Universe Must Contain Millions Of Appropriate Planets, Consciousness In Some Form - But Not With The Paired Eyes And Limbs, And The Brain Built Of Neurons In The Only Example We Know - May Evolve Frequently. But If Only One Origin Of Life In A Million Ever Leads To Consciousness, Then Martian Bacteria Most Emphatically Do Not Imply Little Green Men.
Eye
Men
Origin Of Life
Since We Proposed Punctuated Equilibria To Explain Trends, It Is Infuriating To Be Quoted Again And Again By Creationists-whether Through Design Or Stupidity, I Do Not Know-as Admitting That The Fossil Record Includes No Transitional Forms. Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.
Stupidity
Design
Religion
The Absence Of Fossil Evidence For Intermediary Stages Between Major Transitions In Organic Design, Indeed Our Inability, Even In Our Imagination, To Construct Functional Intermediates In Many Cases, Has Been A Persistent And Nagging Problem For Gradualist Accounts Of Evolution.
Imagination
Design
Fossils
In What I Like To Call The Great Asymmetry, Every Spectacular Incident Of Evil Will Be Balanced By 10,000 Acts Of Kindness, Too Often Unnoted And Invisible.
Positive
Kindness
Evil
I Can Envision Observations And Experiments That Would Disprove Any Evolutionary Theory I Know.
Evolution
Theory
Observation
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
Expectations
Population
Doe
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).
Past
Law
Data
I Believe That We Can Still Have A Genre Of Scientific Books Suitable For And Accessible Alike To Professionals And Interested Laypeople. The Concepts Of Science, In All Their Richness And Ambiguity, Can Be Presented Without Any Compromise, Without Any Simplification Counting As Distortion, In Language Accessible To All Intelligent People. I Hope That This Book Can Be Read With Profit Both In Seminars For Graduate Students And If The Movie Stinks And You Forgot Your Sleeping Pills On The Businessman's Special To Tokyo.
Believe
Book
Sleep
The Human Mind Delights In Finding Pattern—so Much So That We Often Mistake Coincidence Or Forced Analogy For Profound Meaning. No Other Habit Of Thought Lies So Deeply Within The Soul Of A Small Creature Trying To Make Sense Of A Complex World Not Constructed For It.
Mistake
Lying
Profound
Humans Are Not The End Result Of Predictable Evolutionary Progress, But Rather A Fortuitous Cosmic Afterthought, A Tiny Little Twig On The Enormously Arborescent Bush Of Life, Which If Replanted From Seed, Would Almost Surely Not Grow This Twig Again.
Progress
Littles
Tiny
The Real Tragedy Of Human Existence Is Not That We Are Nasty By Nature, But That A Cruel Structural Asymmetry Grants To Rare Events Of Meanness Such Power To Shape Our History.
Real
Rare Events
Tragedy
No More Harmful Nonsense Exists Than [the] Common Supposition That Deepest Insight Into Great Questions About The Meaning Of Life Or The Structure Of Reality Emerges Most Readily When A Free, Undisciplined, And Uncluttered (read, Rather, Ignorant And Uneducated) Mind Soars Above Mere Earthly Knowledge And Concern.
Reality
Ignorant
Mind
[e]volutionists Sometimes Take As Haughty An Attitude Toward The Next Level Up The Conventional Ladder Of Disciplines: The Human Sciences. They Decry The Supposed Atheoretical Particularism Of Their Anthropological Colleagues And Argue That All Would Be Well If Only The Students Of Humanity Regarded Their Subject As Yet Another Animal And Therefore Yielded Explanatory Control To Evolutionary Biologists.
Attitude
Animal
Discipline
Life Began Three And A Half Billion Years Ago, Necessarily About As Simple As It Could Be, Because Life Arose Spontaneously From The Organic Compounds In The Primeval Oceans.
Ocean
Simple
Years
But If We Laugh With Derision, We Will Never Understand. Human Intellectual Capacity Has Not Altered For Thousands Of Years So Far As We Can Tell. If Intelligent People Invested Intense Energy In Issues That Now Seem Foolish To Us, Then The Failure Lies In Our Understanding Of Their World, Not In Their Distorted Perceptions.
Lying
Knowledge
Intelligent
... No Compelling Data To Support Its Anachronistic Social Darwinism.
Data
Support
Atheism
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.
Disappointment
Writing
Loss
We Are The Offspring Of History, And Must Establish Our Own Paths In This Most Diverse And Interesting Of Conceivable Universes—one Indifferent To Our Suffering, And Therefore Offering Us Maximum Freedom To Thrive, Or To Fail, In Our Own Chosen Way.
Atheist
Offering
Interesting
We Are Here Because One Odd Group Of Fishes Had A Peculiar Fin Anatomy That Could Transform Into Legs For Terrestrial Creatures; Because The Earth Never Froze Entirely During An Ice Age; Because A Small And Tenuous Species, Arising In Africa A Quarter Of A Million Years Ago, Has Managed, So Far, To Survive By Hook And By Crook. We May Yearn For A ‘higher Answer’– But None Exists
Atheist
Years
Ice
As A Word, Ecology Has Been So Debased By Recent Political Usage That Many People Employ It To Identify Anything Good That Happens Far From Cities And Without Human Interference.
Cities
People
Political
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.
Science
Evolution
Process
Something Deep Within Us Drives Accurate Messiness Into The Neat Channels Of Canonical Stories.
Stories
Deep Within
Neat
Any Decent Writer Writes Because There's Some Deep Internal Need To Keep Learning.
Writing
Needs
Decent
The Center Of Human Nature Is Rooted In Ten Thousand Ordinary Acts Of Kindness That Define Our Days.
Kindness
Ordinary
Human Nature
Precise Adaptation, With Each Part Finely Honed To Perform A Definite Function In An Optimal Way, Can Only Lead To Blind Alleys, Dead Ends, And Extinction.
Extinction
Way
Blind
Forelimbs Of People, Porpoises, Bats And Horses Provide The Classic Example Of Homology In Most Textbooks. They Look Different, And Do Different Things, But Are Built Of The Same Bones. No Engineer, Starting From Scratch Each Time, Would Have Built Such Disparate Structures From The Same Parts.
Horse
Time
People
Hyper-selectionism Has Been With Us For A Long Time In Various Guises; For It Represents The Late Nineteenth Century's Scientific Version Of The Myth Of Natural Harmony All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds (all Structures Well Designed For A Definite Purpose In This Case). It Is, Indeed, The Vision Of Foolish Dr. Pangloss, So Vividly Satirized By Voltaire In Candide The World Is Not Necessarily Good, But It Is The Best We Could Possibly Have.
Long
Vision
Drs
Life Is Short, And Potential Studies Infinite. We Have A Much Better Chance Of Accomplishing Something Significant When We Follow Our Passionate Interests And Work In Areas Of Deepest Personal Meaning.
Life Is Short
Passionate
Chance
I Dreamed Of Becoming A Scientist, In General, And A Paleontologist, In Particular, Ever Since The Tyrannosaurus Skeleton Awed And Scared Me.
Skeletons
Becoming
Scared
I Love To Read The Dedications Of Old Books Written In Monarchies For They Invariably Honor Some (usually Insignificant) Knight Or Duke With Fulsome Words Of Sycophantic Insincerity, Praising Him As The Light Of The Universe (in Hopes, No Doubt, For A Few Ducats To Support Future Work); This Old Practice Makes Me Feel Like Such An Honest And Upright Man, By Comparison, When I Put A Positive Spin, Perhaps Ever So Slightly Exaggerated, On A Grant Proposal.
Book
Dedication
Men
It Has Become, In My View, A Bit Too Trendy To Regard The Acceptance Of Death As Something Tantamount To Intrinsic Dignity. Of Course I Agree With The Preacher Of Ecclesiastes That There Is A Time To Love And A Time To Die - And When My Skein Runs Out I Hope To Face The End Calmly And In My Own Way. For Most Situations, However, I Prefer The More Martial View That Death Is The Ultimate Enemy - And I Find Nothing Reproachable In Those Who Rage Mightily Against The Dying Of The Light.
Running
Science
Acceptance
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.
Baseball
Commitment
Views
We Should Take Comfort In Two Conjoined Features Of Nature: First, That Our World Is Incredibly Strange And Therefore Supremely Fascinating, Second, That However Bizarre And Arcane Our World Might Be, Nature Remains Potentially Comprehensible To The Human Mind.
Our World
Two
Mind
With Copious Evidence Ranging From Plato's Haughtiness To Beethoven's Tirades, We May Conclude That The Most Brilliant People Of History Tend To Be A Prickly Lot.
Plato
People
Haughtiness
The Classical Argument For Why A Supposedly Decent And Moral Creature Like Homo Sapiens Can Mistreat And Even Extirpate Other Species Rests Upon An Extreme Position In A Continuum. The Cartesian Tradition, Formulated Explicitly In The Seventeenth Century, But Developed In "folk" And Other Versions Throughout Human History No Doubt, Holds That Other Animals Are Little More Than Unfeeling Machines, With Only Humans Enjoying "consciousness," However Defined.
Animal
Doubt
Machines
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.
Patriotic
Discovery
Long
The Intricate And Different Life Cycles Of Both Male And Female Root-heads, And The Great Behavioral Sophistication Shown By The Female In Reconfiguring A Host Crab As A Support System, All Underscore The Myopia Of Our Conventional Wisdom In Regarding Rhizocephalans As Degenerate Parasites Because The Adult Anatomy Of Internal Roots And External Sac Seem So Simple.
Simple
Roots
Support Systems
Asian Homo Erectus Died Without Issue And Does Not Enter Our Immediate Ancestry (for We Evolved From African Populations); Neanderthal People Were Collateral Cousins, Perhaps Already Living In Europe While We Emerged In Africa... In Other Words, We Are An Improbable And Fragile Entity, Fortunately Successful After Precarious Beginnings As A Small Population In Africa, Not The Predictable End Result Of A Global Tendency. We Are A Thing, An Item Of History, Not An Embodiment Of General Principles.
Cousin
Successful
Science
In Science, 'fact' Can Only Mean 'confirmed To Such A Degree That It Would Be Perverse To Withhold Provisional Assent.' I Suppose That Apples Might Start To Rise Tomorrow, But The Possibility Does Not Merit Equal Time In Physics Classrooms.
Mean
Science
Apples
Understanding Quotes: Their Essence and Application

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

1. Defining Quotes

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


2. The Importance of Quotes

2.1. Enhancing Credibility

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


2.2. Providing Evidence

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


2.3. Conveying Emotions and Perspectives

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


3. Types of Quotes

3.1. Direct Quotes

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


3.2. Indirect Quotes (Paraphrasing)

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


3.3. Block Quotes

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



4. Proper Usage of Quotes


4.1. Contextual Relevance

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


4.2. Integration into Your Writing

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


4.3. Attribution and Citation

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


5. Common Mistakes to Avoid


5.1. Overusing Quotes

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


5.2. Lack of Analysis

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


5.3. Misquoting or Taking Out of Context

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



6. Quotes in Different Contexts


6.1. Academic Writing

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


6.2. Journalism

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


6.3. Literature and Creative Writing

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



7. Punctuation and Formatting


Understanding the correct punctuation and formatting of quotes is essential:


Quotation Marks: Always enclose direct quotes within quotation marks.


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


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



8. Ethical Considerations


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

9. Tools for Managing Quotes


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



Conclusion


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


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