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.
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.
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.
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.
Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.
I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he’ll never type or play the piano.
We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.
Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well?
Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.
Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!
The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.
People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among the details, not in the realm of pure generality. We must tackle and grasp the larger, encompassing themes of our universe, but we make our best approach through small curiosities that rivet our attention – all those pretty pebbles on the shoreline of knowledge. For the ocean of truth washes over the pebbles with every wave, and they rattle and clink with the most wondrous din.
I will rejoice in the multifariousness of nature and leave the chimera of certainty to politicians and preachers.
Common sense is a very poor guide to scientific insight for it represents cultural prejudice more often than it reflects the native honesty of a small boy before the naked emperor.
But how can a series of reasonable intermediate forms be constructed? Of what value could the first tiny step toward an eye be to its possessor? The dung-mimicking insect is well protected, but can there be any edge in looking only 5 percent like a turd?
If Ediacara survivors had been able to evolve internal complexity later on, then the pathways from this radically different starting point would have produced a world worthy of science fiction at its best.
We are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions.
Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.