Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
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.
I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam – I break in order to reveal.
Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as ‘the intelligent layperson’ does exist – in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.
I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.
I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life’s pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.
We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.
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.
Even the standard example of ancient nonsense – the debate about angels on pinheads – makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
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.
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.
Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity – the most precious trait of any adequate analysis – is erased.
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.