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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.

-Stephen Jay Gould

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Very Little Comes Easily

Stephen Jay Gould

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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.

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No Geologist Worth Anything Is Permanently Bound To A Desk Or Laboratory, But The Charming Notion That True Science Can Only Be Based On Unbiased Observation Of Nature In The Raw Is Mythology. Creative Work, In Geology And Anywhere Else, Is Interaction And Synthesis: Half-baked Ideas From A Bar Room, Rocks In The Field, Chains Of Thought From Lonely Walks, Numbers Squeezed From Rocks In A Laboratory, Numbers From A Calculator Riveted To A Desk, Fancy Equipment Usually Malfunctioning On Expensive Ships, Cheap Equipment In The Human Cranium, Arguments Before A Road Cut.

The 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.

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.

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.

'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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

If We Choose A Weak And Foolish Speculation As A Primary Textbook Illustration (falsely Assuming That The Tale Possesses A Weight Of History And A Sanction Of Evidence), Then We Are In For Trouble - As Critics Properly Nail The Particular Weakness, And Then Assume That The Whole Theory Must Be In Danger If Supporters Choose Such A Fatuous Case As A Primary Illustration.

The 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Journalistic Tradition So Exalts Novelty And Flashy Discovery, As Reputable And Newsworthy, That Standard Accounts For The Public Not Only Miss The Usual Activity Of Science But Also, And More Unfortunately, Convey A False Impression About What Drives Research.

Life Began Three And A Half Billion Years Ago, Necessarily About As Simple As It Could Be, Because Life Arose Spontaneously From The Organic Compounds In The Primeval Oceans.

The 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Theory Of Evolution

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

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

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

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

Before Kuhn, Most Scientists Followed The Place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge Tradition, And Would Have Told You That They Hoped, Above All, To Lay Many Of The Bricks, Perhaps Even The Keystone, Of Truth's Temple. Now Most Scientists Of Vision Hope To Foment Revolution. We Are, Therefore, Awash In Revolutions, Most Self-proclaimed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic Worldview.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Why, Then, Do I Continue To Claim That Creationism Isn't Science? Simply Because These Relatively Few Statements Have Been Tested And Conclusively Refuted.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Few Tragedies Can Be More Extensive Than The Stunting Of Life, Few Injustices Deeper Than The Denial Of An Opportunity To Strive Or Even To Hope, By A Limit Imposed From Without, But Falsely Identified As Lying Within.

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.

Theory And Fact Are Equally Strong And Utterly Interdependent; One Has No Meaning Without The Other. We Need Theory To Organize And Interpret Facts, Even To Know What We Can Or Might Observe. And We Need Facts To Validate Theories And Give Them Substance.

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.

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.

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.

An Old Paleontological In Joke Proclaims That Mammalian Evolution Is A Tale Told By Teeth Mating To Produce Slightly Altered Descendant Teeth.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Our World Is Not An Optimal Place, Fine Tuned By Omnipotent Forces Of Selection. It Is A Quirky Mass Of Imperfections, Working Well Enough (often Admirably); A Jury-rigged Set Of Adaptations Built Of Curious Parts Made Available By Past Histories In Different Contexts. A World Optimally Adapted To Current Environments Is A World Without History, And A World Without History Might Have Been Created As We Find It. History Matters; It Confounds Perfection And Proves That Current Life Transformed Its Own Past.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What An Odd Time To Be A Fundamentalist About Adaptation And Natural Selection - When Each Major Subdiscipline Of Evolutionary Biology Has Been Discovering Other Mechanisms As Adjuncts To Selection's Centrality.

Darwinian Natural Selection Only Yields Adaptation To Changing Local Environments, And Better Function In An Immediate Habitat Might Just As Well Be Achieved By Greater Simplicity In Form And Behavior As By Ever-increasing Complexity.

The More Important The Subject And The Closer It Cuts To The Bone Of Our Hopes And Needs, The More We Are Likely To Err In Establishing A Framework For Analysis.

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'.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We Have Become, By The Power Of A Glorious Evolutionary Accident Called Intelligence, The Stewards Of Life's Continuity On Earth. We Did Not Ask For This Role, But We Cannot Abjure It. We May Not Be Suited To It, But Here We Are.

I Believe That We Can Still Have A Genre Of Scientific Books Suitable For And Accessible Alike To Professionals And Interested Laypeople. The Concepts Of Science, In All Their Richness And Ambiguity, Can Be Presented Without Any Compromise, Without Any Simplification Counting As Distortion, In Language Accessible To All Intelligent People. I Hope That This Book Can Be Read With Profit Both In Seminars For Graduate Students And If The Movie Stinks And You Forgot Your Sleeping Pills On The Businessman's Special To Tokyo.

If 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.

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.

The Enemy Of Knowledge And Science Is Irrationalism, Not Religion

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

Changing Environment

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.

[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.

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

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

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

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

The Dogmatist Within Is Always Worse Than The Enemy Without.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Pass Through This World But Once.

Evolution Is A Process Of Constant Branching And Expansion.

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

I Am Particularly Fond Of [emmanuel Mendes Da Costa's] Natural History Of Fossils Because This Treatise, More Than Any Other Work Written In English, Records A Short Episode Expressing One Of The Grand False Starts In The History Of Natural Science And Nothing Can Be Quite So Informative And Instructive As A Juicy Mistake.

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?.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Are Glorious Accidents Of An Unpredictable Process With No Drive To Complexity, Not The Expected Results Of Evolutionary Principles That Yearn To Produce A Creature Capable Of Understanding The Mode Of Its Own Necessary Construction.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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

History Employs Evolution To Structure Biological Events In Time.

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

Current Utility And Historical Origin Are Different Subjects.

Nature Is What She Is - Amoral And Persistent.

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.

It's True That The Level Of Scientific Knowledge Among Adults Is Very Low, But That's Not Because There Isn't A Natural Interest. I Think Most Kids Are Fascinated By The Natural World. I've Often Said That If You Could Quantify The Mental Power Involved In All The Dinosaur Names Correctly Known And Correctly Spelled By 5-year-old Kids In America, You Could Move Any Mountain On Earth.

The 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

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