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.
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.
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.
Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right.
If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.
Any decent writer writes because there’s some deep internal need to keep learning.
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.
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
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 a process of constant branching and expansion.
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria.
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.
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.
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.
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 proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Is uniformitarianism necessary?
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.
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.