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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

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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.

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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).

Evolution Is A Process Of Constant Branching And Expansion.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Hyper-selectionism Has Been With Us For A Long Time In Various Guises; For It Represents The Late Nineteenth Century's Scientific Version Of The Myth Of Natural Harmony All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds (all Structures Well Designed For A Definite Purpose In This Case). It Is, Indeed, The Vision Of Foolish Dr. Pangloss, So Vividly Satirized By Voltaire In Candide The World Is Not Necessarily Good, But It Is The Best We Could Possibly Have.

The 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 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.

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

Mass Extinction

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.

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.

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.

It Seems The Height Of Antiquated Hubris To Claim That The Universe Carried On As It Did For Billions Of Years In Order To Form A Comfortable Abode For Us. Chance And Historical Contingency Give The World Of Life Most Of Its Glory And Fascination. I Sit Here Happy To Be Alive And Sure That Some Reason Must Exist For "why Me?" Or The Earth Might Have Been Totally Covered With Water, And An Octopus Might Now Be Telling Its Children Why The Eight-legged God Of All Things Had Made Such A Perfect World For Cephalopods.

The 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Current Utility And Historical Origin Are Different Subjects.

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

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.

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.

The Board Transported Its Jurisdiction To A Never-never Land Where A Dorothy Of The New Millennium Might Exclaim: "they Still Call It Kansas, But I Don't Think We're In The Real World Anymore."

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

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.

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

Changing Environment

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

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

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.

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.

Each Worldview Was A Cultural Product, But Evolution Is True And Separate Creation Is Not. [...] Worldviews Are Social Constructions, And They Channel The Search For Facts. But Facts Are Found And Knowledge Progresses, However Fitfully. Fact And Theory Are Intertwined, And All Great Scientists Understand The Interaction.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The History Of Life Is More Adequately Represented By A Picture Of 'punctuated Equilibria' Than By The Notion Of Phyletic Gradualism. The History Of Evolution Is Not One Of Stately Unfolding, But A Story Of Homeostatic Equilibria, Disturbed Only 'rarely' (i.e. Rather Often In The Fullness Of Time) By Rapid And Episodic Events Of Speciation.

History Of Life

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!'

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

The Extreme Rarity Of Transitional Forms In The Fossil Record Persists As A Trade Secret Of Paleontology. Evolutionary Trees That Adorn Our Textbooks Have Data Only At The Tips And Nodes Of Their Branches; The Rest Is Inference, However Reasonable, Not The Evidence Of Fossils.

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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".

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

... Many Folks Take Them Seriously Because They Just 'know' That Evolution Can Never Be Seen In The Immediate Here And Now. In Fact, A Precisely Opposite Situation Prevails: Biologists Have Documented A Veritable Glut Of Cases For Rapid And Eminently Measurable Evolution On Timescales Of Years And Decades.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nature Is What She Is - Amoral And Persistent.

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.

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

Organisms [...] Are Directed And Limited By Their Past. They Must Remain Imperfect In Their Form And Function, And To That Extent Unpredictable Since They Are Not Optimal Machines. We Cannot Know Their Future With Certainty, If Only Because A Myriad Of Quirky Functional Shifts Lie Within The Capacity Of Any Feature, However Well Adapted To A Present Role.

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.

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

If We Are Still Here To Witness The Destruction Of Our Planet Some Five Billion Years Or More Hence, Then We Will Have Achieved Something So Unprecedented In The History Of Life That We Should Be Willing To Sing Our Swansong With Joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

History Of Life

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.

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?

Complex Organisms Cannot Be Construed As The Sum Of Their Genes, Nor Do Genes Alone Build Particular Items Of Anatomy Or Behavior By Themselves. Most Genes Influence Several Aspects Of Anatomy And Behavior As They Operate Through Complex Interactions With Other Genes And Their Products, And With Environmental Factors Both Within And Outside The Developing Organism. We Fall Into A Deep Error, Not Just A Harmful Oversimplification, When We Speak Of Genes "for" Particular Items Of Anatomy Or Behavior.

Interaction With Others

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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

We Pass Through This World But Once.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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).

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

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.

It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary Biologist To Write About Extinction Caused By Human Stupidity. Let Me Then Float An Unconventional Plea, The Inverse Of The Usual Argument. The Extinction Of Partula Is Unfair To Partula. That Is The Conventional Argument, And I Do Not Challenge Its Primacy. But We Need A Humanistic Ecology As Well, Both For The Practical Reason That People Will Always Touch People More Than Snails Do Or Can, And For The Moral Reason That Humans Are Legitimately The Measure Of All Ethical Questions For These Are Our Issues, Not Nature's.

Ethical Questions

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

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

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.

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

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.

History Employs Evolution To Structure Biological Events In Time.

Surely The Mitochondrion That First Entered Another Cell Was Not Thinking About The Future Benefits Of Cooperation And Integration; It Was Merely Trying To Make Its Own Living In A Tough Darwinian World

I Strongly Reject Any Conceptual Scheme That Places Our Options On A Line, And Holds That The Only Alternative To A Pair Of Extreme Positions Lies Somewhere Between Them. More Fruitful Perspectives Often Require That We Step Off The Line To A Site Outside The Dichotomy.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Median Isn't The Message.

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

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

Any Human Being Is Really Good At Certain Things. The Problem Is That The Things You're Good At Come Naturally. And Since Most People Are Pretty Modest Instead Of An Arrogant S.o.b. Like Me, What Comes Naturally, You Don't See As A Special Skill. It's Just You. It's What You've Always Done.

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.

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.

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

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

The 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.

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.

The Most Important Scientific Revolutions All Include, As Their Only Common Feature, The Dethronement Of Human Arrogance From One Pedestal After Another Of Previous Convictions About Our Centrality In The Cosmos.

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.

The Spirit Of Plato Dies Hard. We Have Been Unable To Escape The Philosophical Tradition That What We Can See And Measure In The World Is Merely The Superficial And Imperfect Representation Of An Underlying Reality.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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".

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

So Much Of Science Proceeds By Telling Stories.

Telling Stories

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

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

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.)

[in Natural History,] Great Discovery Often Requires A Map To A Hidden Mine Filled With Gems Then Easily Gathered By Conventional Tools, Not A Shiny New Space-age Machine For Penetrating Previously Inaccessible Worlds.

If 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Since We Proposed Punctuated Equilibria To Explain Trends, It Is Infuriating To Be Quoted Again And Again By Creationists-whether Through Design Or Stupidity, I Do Not Know-as Admitting That The Fossil Record Includes No Transitional Forms. Transitional Forms Are Generally Lacking At The Species Level, But They Are Abundant Between Larger Groups.

The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm.

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

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

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.

No One-liner Can Ever Be Optimal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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