Available Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

“Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.” quote by Stephen Jay Gould — Download Open image

“Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.”

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Available Components Engineers Evolution Ideals Jury Made Orchids Rigged

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I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme…

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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

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In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart…

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... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact,…

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Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...

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Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower"…

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The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

Stephen Jay Gould

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The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our…

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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…

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When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point…

Stephen Jay Gould

The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries…

Stephen Jay Gould

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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…

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I wrote when I was a young teen, but I didn't put an eye on the available markets until I was seventeen. The next…

Robert Reed

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One of the worst things to come out of the Consumer Protection Board's misleading claims is the impression that government resources are to hard…

Matthew Lesko

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Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever…

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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No actor wants to choose - they just want all of the options available to them all the time; we tend to be pretty…

Gillian Jacobs

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Never belong to a crowd; Never belong to a nation; Never belong to a religion; Never belong to a race. Belong to the whole…

Rajneesh

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I used practically all the money I had available.

Bernard Ebbers

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But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

Naomi Klein

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There was no mistake in us making abortion legal and available on demand. That was what we call progress. Just like it was no mistake that we abolished institutional racism in this country around the same time. The easy thing to do is lay low, but then are we who we say we are? Do we actually stand for anything,…

Mark Ruffalo

I do worry because it takes all types to make our culture, to make our art. We need it to be available to all.

Neve McIntosh

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So-called Western Civilization, as practised in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history…

P. J. O'Rourke

The internal peace of every country depends upon the knowledge that force is available to uphold law.

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon

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It is truly amazing that, with much less neuroscientific knowledge available, Hayek's model comes closer, in some respects, to being neurophysiologically verifiable than those…

Joaquin Fuster

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