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.”
Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.
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.
An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.
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.
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.
In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible...
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.
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.
History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.
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.
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.
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
No one-liner can ever be optimal.
All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.