‘Steve was faced with a peculiar challenge. He had his particular field, evolutionary biology, which he was drawn to, and in which he excelled, from an early age. But he was also a polymath or omnivore, endlessly curious, with an enormous fund of what might seem to be irrelevant or scattered knowledge, knowledge which would have no place in the usual narrow, rigidly organized format of scientific writing. It was only in his thirties that Steve found a solution – to expand the boundaries of his writing so that it could embrace that most varied facts and thoughts.’ Oliver Sacks (xii-xiii)
- ‘Life represents a different kind of ultimately fragile system, utterly dependent upon unbroken continuity. For life, the zero line designates a permanent end, not a temporary embarrassment. If life ever touched that line, for one fleeting moment at any time during 3.5 billion years of sustained history, neither we nor a million species of beetles would grace this planet today. The merest momentary brush with voracious zero dooms all that might have been, forever after’ (16)
- ‘Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many men rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often by viewed as repugnant by later generations.’ (20)
- ‘Of all that I shall miss in ending this series of essays, I shall feel most keenly the loss of fellowship and interaction with readers. Early in the series, I began – more as a rhetorical device to highlight a spirit of interaction them as a practical tactic for gaining information – to pose questions to readers when my research failed to resolve a textual byway.’ (20)
- ‘ All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee:
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see:
All Discord, Harmony not understood:
All partial Evil, universal Good.’ Alexander Pope (36)
- The usual reading of the [Scopes] trial as an epic trouble between benighted Yahooism and resplendent virtue simply cannot suffice – however strongly this impression has been fostered both by Inherit the Wind and by the famous reporting of H.L. Mencken.’ (50)
- ‘William Jennings Bryan Darwin
- ‘The ACLU wanted a quick process and a sure conviction, not a media circus… The local judge held no power to determine the constitutionality of the statute, and the ACLU therefore sought an unproblematical [sic] conviction, designated for appeal to a higher court.’ (50) - ‘As an exercise in public relations, the Scopes trial may be read as a victory for our side. But the legal consequences could hardly have been more disastrous. Scopes was, of course, convicted – no surprises there. But the case was subsequently declared moot – and therefore unappealable – by the judge’s error of fining Scope one hundred dollars (as the creationism statute specified) whereas Tennessee
- ‘We misidentify the protagonists of this battle in the worst possible way when we depict evolution versus creationism as a major skirmish in a general war between science and religion. Almost all scientists and almost all religious leaders have joined forces on the same side – against the creationists.’ (57)
- ‘Creationists do not represent the magisterium of religion. They zealously promote a particular theological doctrine – an intellectually marginal and demographically minority view of religion that they long to impose upon the entire world. And the teachers of Arkansas United States America
- ‘Our propensity for thinking in dichotomies may lie deeply within human nature itself. In his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (written circa A.D. 2000), Diogenes Laertius quotes a much older maxim of Protagoras: ‘there are two sides to every question, exactly opposite to each other.’ But we can also utilize another basic trait of our common humanity – our mental flexibility, and our consequent potential for overcoming such innate limitations by education. Our tendency to parse complex nature into pairings of ‘us versus them’ should not only be judged as false in our universe of shadings and continua, but also (and often) harmful, given another human propensity for judgment – so that ‘us versus them easily becomes ‘good versus bad,’ or even, when zealotry fans our xenophobic flames, ‘chosen for martyrdom versus ripe for burning.’ The contingent and largely arbitrary nature of disciplinary boundaries has unfortunately been reinforced, and even made to seem ‘natural,’ by our drive to construct dichotomies – with science versus art as perhaps the most widely accepted of all.’ (59)
- ‘Art and science could join forces by stressing our common methods in critical thinking, our common search for innovation, and our common respect for historical achievement – rather than emphasizing our disparate substrates and trying to profit from the differences in playing a zero-sum game at the other’s expense.’ (60)
- ‘Retrospective history, with its anachronistic standards, can only lead us to devalue )and thereby misunderstand) our predecessors – for time’s arrow asserts its sway upon human history primarily through the bias of progress and leads us to view the past as ever more inadequate the further back we go.’ (76)
- ‘I find personal merit in taking unfamiliar past arguments at face value and working through their logic and implications. These exercises have taught me more about thinking in general than any explicit treatise on principles of reasoning.’ (76)
- [on gift shop ‘fossils’, etc.] ‘After much scrutiny, I finally worked out the usual mode of manufacture. The fossil fakes are plaster casts, often remarkably well done. The forger cuts a flat surface on a real rock and then cements the plaster cast to this substrate. (If you look carefully from the side, you can always make out the junction of rock and plaster.) Some fakes have been crudely confected, but the best examples match the color and form of rock to overlying plaster so cleverly that distinctions become nearly invisible.’ (90)
- ‘In power of intellect, and range and breadth of output, Cuvier easily matched Darwin Darwin
- ‘A library disposed in a suite of rooms, each containing works on one subject. There is one where there are all the works on ornithology, in another room all on ichthyology, in another osteology, in another law books! etc., etc… the ordinary studio contains no bookshelves. It is a longish room, comfortably furnished, lighted from above, with eleven desks to stand to, and to low tables, like a public office for so many clerks. But all is for the one man, who multiplies himself as author, and admitting no one into this room, moves as he finds necessary, or as fancy inclines him, from one occupation to another. Each desk is furnished with a complete establishment of inkstand, pens, etc.’ Charles Lyell on Cuvier’s workspace (104)
- ‘If the viscera of an animal are so organized only to be fitted for the digestion of recent flesh, it is also requisite that the jaws should be constructed so as to fit them for devouring prey; the claws must be constructed for seizing it and tearing it to pieces; the teeth for cutting and dividing its flesh; the entire system of the limbs, or organs of motion, for pursuing and overtaking it; and the organs of sense, for discovering it at a distance… Thus, commencing our investigation by a careful survey of any one bone by itself, a person who is sufficiently master of the laws of organic structure, may, as it were, reconstruct the whole animal to which that bone had belonged to.’ Cuvier (108)
- But a single tooth will not tell me how long the legs were, how sharp the claws, or even how many other teeth the jaw held. Animals are bundles of historical accidents, not perfect and predictable machines.’ (109)
- ‘Cuvier’s eclipse is awash in irony, but no element of his denigration is more curiously unfair than the charge that his catastrophism reflects a theological compromise with his scientific ideals. In the great debates of early-nineteenth-century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science – empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the records of the rocks directly. This record, read literally, is one of discontinuity and abrupt transition: faunas disappear; terrestrial rocks lie under marine rocks with no recorded transitional environments between; horizontal sediments overlie twisted and fractured strata of an earlier age. Uniformitarians, the traditional opponents of catastrophism, did not triumph because they read the record more objectively. Rather, uniformitarians, like Lyell and Darwin, advocated a more subtle and less empirical method: use reason and inference simply to supply the missing information that imperfect evidence cannot record.’ (111)
- ‘As a rough rule of thumb, I always look to closing paragraphs as indications of a book’s essential character. General treatises in the pontifical mode proclaim a union of all knowledge, or tell us, in no uncertain terms, what it all means for man’s physical future and moral development. Cuvier’s conclusion is revealing in its starkly contrasting style. No drum rolls, no statements about the implications of catastrophism for human history. Cuvier simply presents a ten-page list of outstanding problems in stratigraphic geology.’ (112)
- ‘A man who could end one of the greatest theoretical treatises in natural history with a plea for unraveling the stratigraphic position and faunal content of the Oenigen stinkstones knew, in the most profound way, what science is about. We may wallow forever in the unthinkable; science traffics in the doable.’ (113)
- ‘Alternate mappings might give us great insight into differences among human cultures, times, and mentalities – as the French Annales school of historians has taught us, with their emphasis on changing patterns in ordinary life, featuring working men and women rather than kings and conquerors. In school, I learned the conventional history of dates, nations, and battles. My mental maps of time and geography all follow the usual lines: temporal divisions by kings and presidents, spatial boundaries by nations and languages. But other systems make as much sense, and surely have more relevance to people whose primary activities enjoin different divisions.’ (114)
- ‘On one issue I do have confidence, based on sufficient personal experience, of adherence to a moral code not always followed in other professions. Science does not tend to be international. We share information, try hard to communicate with each other, and deplore the parochialisms that stymie contact. (How, for example, can my field of paleontology prosper if scientists are not free to collect and study the fossils of their expertise wherever they occur?) We all know numerous stories of warm and continued cooperation between scientists in nations dedicated to blasting each other off the face of the earth. We have to work this way, for knowledge is universal.’ (125)
- ‘Kingsolver and Koehl have actually measured the functional shift by showing that incipient wings aid thermoregulation but provide no aerodynamic advantage and increase the benefits steadily thereafter.’ (153)
- ‘Perhaps that greatest and most effective of all evolutionary inventions, the origin of human consciousness, required little more than an increase of brainpower to a level where internal connections become rich and varied enough to force this seminal transition. The story may be much more complex, but we have no proof that it must be.’ (154)
- ‘Trifles may matter in nature, but they are unconventional subjects for last books. Most eminent graybeards sum up their life’s thought and offer a few pompous suggestions for reconstituting the future. Charles Darwin wrote about worms – The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms
- ‘Everyone appreciates a nifty idea or an abstraction that makes a person sit up, blink hard several times to clear the intellectual cobwebs, and reverse a cherished opinion.’ (157)
- ‘Darwin
- ‘(Worms continually pass soil through their intestinal canals, extract anything they can use for food, and ‘cast’ the rest; the rejected material is not feces but primarily soil particles, reduced in average size by trituration and with some organic matter removed.) The castings, originally spiral in form and composed of fine particles, are then disaggregated by wind and water, and spread out to form vegetable mold. ‘I was thus led to conclude,’ Darwin
- ‘[Darwin
- ‘For several years it was clothed with an extremely scant vegetation, and was so thickly covered with small and large flints (some of them half as large as a child’s head) that the field was always called by my sons ‘the stony field’. When they ran down the slope the stones clattered together. I remember doubting whether I should live to see these larger flints covered with vegetable mould and turf. But the smaller stones disappeared before many years had elapsed, as did every one of the larger ones after a time; so that after thirty years (1871) a horse could gallop over the compact turn from one end of the field to the other, and not strike a single stone with his shoes.’ Darwin
- ‘We have three principles for increasing adequacy of data: if you must work with a single object, look for imperfections that record historical descent; if several objects are available, try to render them as stages of a single historical process; if processes can be directly observed, sum up their effects through time.’ (164)
- ‘A year after publishing his worm book, Darwin April 19, 1882 . He wished to be buried in the soil of his adopted village, where he would have made a final and corporeal gift to his beloved worms. But the sentiments (and politicking) of fellow scientists and men of learning secured a guarded place for his body within the well-mortared floor of Westminster Abbey [at the foot of Newton
- ‘Marx lived most of his life in London Belgium Germany France London
- ‘I had seen very much of this founder of modern theoretic socialism, as well as of his most refined wife; and, though he had never succeeded in persuading me to adopt socialist views, we often discussed the most varied topics of politics, science, literature, and art. Besides learning much from this great man, who was a mine of deep and accurate knowledge in every sphere, I learnt to hold him in high respect and to love the purity, gentleness, and refinement of his big heart.’ Charles Waldstein on Karl Marx (178)
- ‘Karl Marx, who met Lankester [Waldstein’s friend] in 1880, must not be confused with Karl Marx, the posthumous standard-bearer for some of the worst crimes in human history.’ (180)
- ‘All historical studies – whether of human biography or of evolutionary lineages in biology – potentially suffer from this ‘presentist’ fallacy. Modern chroniclers know the outcomes that actually unfolded as unpredictable consequences of past events – and they often, and inappropriately, judge the motives and actions of their subjects in terms of futures unknowable at the time. Thus, and far too frequently, evolutionists view a small and marginal lineage of pond-dwelling Devonian fishes as higher in the scale of being and destined for success because we know, but only in retrospect, that these organisms spawned all modern vertebrates, including our exalted selves. And we overly honor a peculiar species of African primates as central to the forward thrust of evolution because our unique brand of consciousness arose, by contingent good fortune, from such a precarious stock.’ (181)
- ‘A little humility before the luck of our present circumstances might serve us well. A little more fascination for past realities, freed from judgment by later outcomes that only we can know, might help us to understand our history, the primary source for our present condition.’ (181)
- ‘The main virtue of truth, quite apart from its ethical value (which I hold to be considerable), is that it represents an infallible guide for keeping your story straight. The problem with prevarication is that, when the going gets complex or the recollection misty, it becomes very difficult to remember all the details of your invented scheme.’ (188)
- ‘I have come, these days, to realize one very elementary fact: that the best way to win some sort of recognition for my ideas would be to attain, in the truest possible sense of the word, to a ‘sanctity’ that will be manifest to others – not only because of the particular force God would then give to whatever good is in my aspirations and influence – but also because nothing can give me more authority over men than for them to see me as someone who speaks to them from close to God. With God’s help, I must live my ‘vision’ fully, logically, and without deviation. There is nothing more infectious than the example of a life governed by conviction and principle. And how I feel sufficiently drawn to, and sufficiently equipped for, such a life.’ Pierre Teilhard (203)
- ‘Struggle is often a metaphorical description and need not be viewed as overt combat, guns blazing. Tactics for reproductive success include a variety of nonmartial activities such as earlier and more frequent mating or better cooperation with partners in raising offspring.’ (209)
- ‘Natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change (and may, in many cases, be overshadowed by other forces). This point needs emphasis because the standard misapplication of evolutionary theory assumes that biological explanation may be equated with devising accounts, often speculative and conjectural in practice, about the adaptive value of any given feature in its original environment (human aggression as good for hunting, music and religion as good for tribal cohesion, for example). Darwin himself emphasized the multifactorial nature of evolutionary change and warned against too exclusive a reliance on natural selection, by placing the following statement in a maximally conspicuous place at the very end of his introduction: ‘I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification.’ ’ (209-210)
- ‘Theory, of course, is relevant to explaining the pathway (nothing about the pathway can be inconsistent with good theory, and theory can predict certain general aspects of life’s geologic pattern). But the actual pathway is strongly underdetermined by our general theory of life’s evolution.’ (210)
- ‘Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and send history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.’ (211)
- ‘Darwin himself, in the closing lines of The Origin of Species, expressed Victorian social preference more than nature’s record in writing: ‘As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.’ (212)
- ‘Relative to the conventional view of life’s history as an at least broadly predictable process of gradually advancing complexity through time, three features of the paleontological record stand out in opposition and therefore serve as organizing themes for the rest of this article: the constancy of modal complexity throughout life’s history; the concentration of major events in short bursts interspersed with long periods of relative stability; and the role of external impositions, primarily mass extinctions, in disrupting patterns of ‘normal’ times.’ (212)
- ‘The earth is 4.6 billion years old, but the oldest rocks date to about 3.9 billion years because the earth’s surface became molten early in its history, a result of bombardment by large amounts of cosmic debris during the solar system’s coalescence, and of heat generated by radioactive decay of short-lived isotopes. These oldest rocks are too metamorphosed by subsequent heat and pressure to preserve fossils (though some scientists interpret the proportions of carbon isotopes in these rocks as signs of organic production). The oldest rocks sufficiently unaltered to retain cellular fossils – African and Australian sediments dated to 3.5 billion years old – do preserve prokaryotic cells (bacteria and cyanophytes) and stromatolites (mats of sediment trapped and bound by these cells in shall marine waters). Thus, life on the earth evolved quickly and is as old as it could be. This fact alone seems to indicate an inevitability, or at least a predictability, for life’s origin from the original chemical constituents of atmosphere and ocean.’ (213)
- ‘The number of Escherichia coli cells in the gut of each human being exceeds the number of humans that has ever lived on this planet.’ (214)
- ‘Our impression that life evolves towards greater complexity is probably only a bias inspired by parochial focus on ourselves, and consequent overattention to complexifying creatures, while we ignore just as many lineages adapting equally well by becoming simpler in form.’ (215)
- ‘This initial period of both internal and external flexibility yielded a range of invertebrate anatomies that may have exceeded (in just a few million years of production) the full scope of animal form in all the earth’s environment today (after more than 500 million years of additional time for further expansion). Scientists are divided on this question. Some claim that the anatomical range of this initial explosion exceeded that of modern life, as many early experiments died out and no new phyla have ever arisen. But scientists most strongly opposed to this view allow that Cambrian diversity at least equaled the modern range – so even the most cautious opinion holds that 500 million subsequent years of opportunity have not expanded the Cambrian range, achieved in just five million years. The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life… Moreover, we do not know why most of the early experiments died, while a few survived to become our modern phyla. It is tempting to say that the victors won by virtue of greater anatomical complexity, better ecological fit or some other predictable feature of conventional Darwinian struggle. But no recognized trains unite the victors.’ (217)
- ‘Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud’s three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin
- ‘Darwinian concepts are now so canonical in evolutionary theory that students without historical perspective often assume it has been so since 1859. In fact, the triumph of natural selection as a centerpiece of evolutionary theory dates only to a major intellectual movement of the 1930s and 1940s, called by Julian Huxley the ‘modern synthesis.’ ’ (222)
- ‘No biological structure has ever been so pregnant with exaptive possibilities as the human brain.’ (232)
- ‘Never in biological history has evolution built a structure with such an enormous and ramifying set of exaptive possibilities.’ (232)
- ‘For the first time in biological history, organisms can actively pursue fitness not only for themselves but at several levels of their own hierarchy. The gain in potential power and flexibility is staggering. We can now speed and alter the evolution of our species at unprecedented rates and effectiveness.’ (234)
- ‘Two of these three ranked as ‘folk wisdom’ in Darwin’s day and needed no further justification – variation and inheritance (the mechanism of inheritance remained unknown, but its factuality could scarcely be doubted). Only the principle that all organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive – superfecundity, in Darwin’s lovely term – ran counter to popular assumptions about nature’s benevolence, and required Darwin’s specific defense in The Origin.’ (240)
- ‘The key empirical ingredients of punctuated equilibrium – punctuation, stasis, and their relative frequencies – can be made testable and defined operationally. The theory only refers to the origin and development of species in geological time, and must not be misconstructed (as so often done) as a claim for true saltation at a lower organismal level, or for catastrophic mass extinction at a higher fauna level. Punctuation must be scaled relative to the later duration of species in stasis, and we suggest 1-2 percent (analogous to human gestation vs. the length of human life) as an upper bound.’ (243)
- ‘Gradualism certainly can and does occur, but at very low relative frequencies when all species of a fauna are tabulated, and when we overcome our conventional bias for studying only the small percentage of species qualitatively recognized beforehand as having changed through time.’ (243)
- ‘On issues so fundamental as a general philosophy of change, science and society usually work hand in hand. The static systems of European monarchies won support from legions of scholars as the embodiment of natural law. Alexander Pope wrote:
‘Order is Heaven’s first law; and this confessed
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest.’
As monarchies fell and as the eighteenth century ended in an age of revolution, scientists began to see change as a normal part of universal order, not as aberrant and exceptional. Scholars then transferred to nature the liberal program of slow and orderly change that they advocated for social transformation in human society. To many scientists, natural cataclysm seemed as threatening as the reign of terror.’ (262)
- ‘The theory of geographic, or allopatric, speciation is preferred by most evolutionists for most situations (allopatric means ‘in another place’). A new species can arise when a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of the ancestral range. Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread. They may build slowly in frequency, but changing environments usually cancel their selective value long before they reach fixation. Thus, phyletic transformation in large populations should be very rare – as the fossil record proclaims. But small, peripherally isolated groups are cut off from their parental stock. They live as tiny populations in geographic corners of the ancestral range. Selective pressures are usually intense because peripheries mark the edge of ecological tolerance for ancestral forms. Favorable variations spread quickly.’ (264-265)
- ‘I wrote this essay in 1977. Since then, a major shift of opinion has been sweeping through evolutionary biology. The allopatric orthodoxy has been breaking down and several mechanisms of sympatric speciation have been gaining both legitimacy and examples. (In sympatric speciation, new forms arise within the geographic range of their ancestors.) These sympatric mechanisms are united in their insistence upon the two conditions that Eldredge and I require for our model of the fossil record – rapid origin in a small population. In fact, they generally advocate smaller groups and more rapid change than conventional allopatry envisages (primarily because groups in potential contact must move quickly towards reproductive isolation, lest their favorable variants by diluted by breeding with the more numerous parental forms.’ (284)
- ‘About 225 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, fully half the families of marine organisms died out during the short span of a few million years.’ (286)
- ‘When we reconstruct the history of continental movements, we realize that a unique event occurred in the latest Permian: all the continents coalesced to form the single supercontinent of Pangaea.’ (287)
- ‘Many studies now indicate that diversity – the numbers of different species present in a given area – is strongly influenced, if not largely controlled, by the amount of habitable area itself.’ (288)
- ‘We must first understand two things about the Permian extinction and the fossil record in general. First, the Permian extinction primarily affected marine organisms. The relatively few terrestrial plants and vertebrates then living were not so strongly disturbed. Second, the fossil record is very strongly biased toward the preservation of marine life in shallow water. We have almost no fossils of organisms inhabiting the ocean depths. Thus, if we want to test the theory that reduced area played a major role in the Permian extinction, we must look to the area occupied by shallow seas… The effect was general. As shallow seas disappeared, the rich ecosystem of earlier Permian times simply lacked the space to support all its members. The bag became smaller and half the marbles had to be discarded.’ (288-289)
- ‘As the new Darwinian orthodoxy swept through Europe, its most brilliant opponent, the aging embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, remarked with bitter irony that every triumphant theory passes through three stages: first it is dismissed as untrue; then it is rejected as contrary to religion; finally, it is accepted as dogma and each scientist claims that he had long appreciated its truth.’ (290)
- ‘Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation.’ (291)
- ‘These essays must follow two unbreakable rules: I never lie to you, and I strive mightily not to bore you.’ (307)
- ‘Why pick Cerion [his research snail]? Why, indeed, spend so much time on any detailed particular when all the giddy generalities of evolutionary theory beg for study in a lifetime too short to manage but a few? Iconoclast that I am, I would not abandon the central wisdom of natural history from its inception – that concepts without percepts are empty (as Kant said) and that no scientist can develop an adequate ‘feel’ for nature (that undefinable prerequisite of true understanding) without probing deeply into minute empirical details of some well-chosen group of organisms. Thus, Aristotle dissected squids and proclaimed the world’s eternity, while Darwin
- ‘Scientists don’t immerse themselves in particulars only for the grandiose (or self-serving) reason that such studies may lead to important generalities. We do it for fun. The pure joy of discovery transcends impart. And we do it for adventure and for expansion.’ (308)
- ‘Cerion, or any good field project, provides unending stimulation, so long as little puzzles remain as intensely absorbing, fascinating, and frustrating as big questions.’ (317)
- ‘I thought, ‘But who can I tell; who cares?’ And I answered myself, ‘I don’t have to tell anyone. We have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need?’ ’ (318)
- ‘ Who could believe an ant in theory?
A giraffe in blueprint?
Ten thousand doctors of what’s possible
Could reason half the jungle out of being.’ John Ciardi (319)
- One solution to decreasing surface has been particularly important in the progressive evolution of large and complex organisms: the development of internal organs. The lung is, essentially, a richly convoluted bag of surface area for the exchange of gases; the circulatory system distributes material to an internal space that cannot be reached by direct diffusion from the external surface of large organisms; the villi of our small intestine increase the surface area available for absorption of food (small mammals neither have nor need them). Some simpler animals have never evolved internal organs; if they become large, they must alter their entire shape in ways so drastic that plasticity for further evolutionary change is sacrificed to extreme specialization. Thus, a tapeworm maybe 20 feet long, but its thickness cannot exceed a fraction of an inch because food and oxygen must penetrate directly from the external surface to all parts of the body. Other animals are constrained to remain small. Insects breathe through invaginations in their outer surface.’ (320)
- ‘We are prisoners of the perceptions of our size, and rarely recognize how different the world must appear to small animals. Since our relative surface area is so small at our large size, we are ruled by gravitational forces acting upon our weight. But gravity is negligible to very small animals with high surface to volume ratios; they live in a world dominated by surface forces and judge the pleasures and dangers of their surroundings in ways foreign to our experience. An insect performs no miracle in walking up a wall or upon the surface of a pond; the small gravitational force pulling it down or under is easily counteracted by surface adhesion. Throw an insect off the roof and it floats gently down as frictional forces acting upon its surface overcome the weak influence of gravity.’ (320)
- ‘Large churches had to be relatively narrow because ceilings were vaulted in stone and large widths could not be spanned without intermediate supports.’ (322)
- ‘As a subtle thinker, D’Arcy Thompson understood that emphases on diversity and unity do not represent different theories of biology, but different aesthetic styles that profoundly influence the practice of science.’ (326)
- ‘When comparing one organism with another, [the pure taxonomist] describes the differences between them point by point and ‘character’ by ‘character’. If he is from time to time constrained to admit the existence of ‘correlation’ between two characters… he recognizes this fact of correlation somewhat vaguely, as a phenomenon due to causes which, except in rare instances, he can hardly hope to trace; and he falls readily into the habit of thinking and talking of evolution as thought it had proceeded on the lines on his own description, point by point and character by character!’ D’Arcy Thompson (326)
- ‘Galileo recognized that a large organism must change its shape in order to function in the same way as a smaller prototype. The primary law of size and shape involves unequal scaling of surfaces and volumes, but other differential increases have their potent effects as well.’ (333)
- ‘Some of [my paper’s] estimates are quite accurate, while others are little more than educated guesses. Most have been rounded to avoid spurious appearances of high accuracy.’ (338)
- ‘Familiarity has been breeding overtime in our mottoes, producing everything from contempt (according to Aesop) to children (as Mark Twain observed). Polonius, amidst his loquacious wanderings, urged Laertes to seek friends who were tried and true, and then, having chosen well, to ‘grapple them’ to his ‘soul with hoops of steel.’ Yet, as Polonius’s eventual murderer stated in the most famous soliloquy of all time, ‘there’s the rub.’ Those hoops of steel are not easily unbound, and the comfortable familiar becomes a prison of thought.’ (362)
- ‘Chimps are not ancestors but modern cousins, equally distant in evolutionary terms from the unknown forebear of African great apes and humans.’ (363)
- ‘As for Neanderthal, these creatures were probably close cousins belonging to a separate species, not ancestors. In any case, they had brains as large as ours, or larger.’ (364)
- ‘We try to extract a single line of advance from the true topology of copious branching. In this misguided effort, we are inevitably drawn to bushes so near the brink of total annihilation that they retain only one surviving twig. We then view this twig as the acme of upward achievement, rather than the probable last gasp of a richer ancestry. Consider the great warhorse of tradition – the evolutionary ladder of horses themselves. To be sure, an unbroken evolutionary connection does link Hyracotherium (formerly called Eohippus) to modern Equus. And, yes again, modern horses are bigger, with fewer toes and higher crowned teeth. But Hyracotherium-Equus is not a ladder, or even a central lineage. This sequence is but one labyrinthine pathway among thousands on a complex bush. This particular route has achieved prominence for just one ironic reason – because all other twigs are extinct. Equus is the only twig left, and hence the tip of the ladder in our false iconography.’ (367)
- ‘The fatuous idea of a single order amidst the multifarious diversity of modern life flows from our conventional iconographies and the prejudices that nurture them – the ladder of life and the cone of increasing diversity. By the ladder, horseshoe crabs are judged as simple; by the cone, they are deemed old.’ (372)
- ‘I don’t think that any particular secret, mystery, or inordinate subtlety underlies the reasons for our allegiance to these false iconographies or ladder and cone. They are adopted because they nurture our hopes for a universe of intrinsic meaning defined in our terms.’ (373)
- ‘Perhaps we are only an afterthought, a kind of cosmic accident, just one bauble on the Christmas tree of evolution.’ (374)
- ‘If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.’ Mark Twain (375)
- ‘As we travel in time down our own evolutionary tree, we should encounter ever-older ancestors of ever-decreasing mental capacity. The first known expressions of representational art [the cave paintings] should therefore be crude and primitive. Instead, we see the work of a primal Picasso – and we are dumbstruck.’ (377)
- ‘Normal adults differ in brain size by as much as 1,000 cubic centimeters, and no correlation has ever been found between size and intelligence (the average rain occupies about 1,300 cc of volume).’ (387)
- ‘I am not selecting the crackpot statements of a bygone age. I am quoting the major work of recognized leaders. The sway of biological determinism, the lack of sensitivity to environmental influence, and the blatant desire to crown one’s own group as biologically superior are quite characteristic of the time – and scarcely extinct today.’ (412)
- ‘… the four Biblical rivers (Tigris , Euphrates , Indus , and Nile )’ (423)
- ‘The mere existence of a good fit between organism and environment is insufficient evidence for inferring the action of natural selection.’ (436)
- ‘If blushing turns out to be an adaptation affected by sexual selection in humans, it will not help us to understand why blood is red. The immediate utility of an organic structure often says nothing at all about the reason for its being.’ (437)
- ‘We fell that the potential rewards of abandoning exclusive focus on the adaptationist program are very great indeed. We do not offer a council of despair, as adaptationists have charged; for nonadaptive does not mean nonintelligible. We welcome the richness that a pluralistic approach, so akin to Darwin
- ‘As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work and subsequently, I place in a most conspicuous position – namely at the close of the Introduction – the followings words: ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’ This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.’ Darwin
- ‘Strict constructionists are now engaged in an almost mordantly self-conscious effort to ‘revolutionize’ the study of human behavior along a Darwinian straight and narrow under the name of ‘evolutionary psychology.’ ’ (445)
- ‘The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature’s benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and excellence, prove the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all (the old-style theological version), or at least that nature has meaningful directions and that humans fit into a sensible and predictable pattern regulating the totality (the modern and more secular version).’ (446)
- ‘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. The extended stability of most species, and the branching off of new species in geological moments (however slowly by the irrelevant scale of a human life) – the pattern known as punctuated equilibrium – require that long-term evolutionary trends be explained as the distinctive success of some species versus others, and not as a gradual accumulation of adaptations generated by organisms within a continuously evolving population.’ (449)
- ‘Natural selection does not explain why many evolutionary transitions from one nucleotide to another are neutral, and therefore nonadaptive. Natural selection does not explain why a meteor crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, setting in motion the extinction of half the world’s species.’ (451)
- An example of the overstretching of evolution: ‘The thousand and thousand of genes that influence human behavior – genes that build the brain and govern neurotransmitters and other hormones, thus defining our ‘mental organs’ – are here for a reason. And the reason is that they goaded our ancestors into getting their genes into the next generation. If the theory of natural selection is correct, then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these terms. The basic way we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each other, are with us today by virtue of their past contribution to genetic fitness.’ Robert Wright, The Moran Animal (461)
- ‘The principle of differential ‘parental investment’ makes Darwinian sense and probably does underlie some different, and broadly general, emotional propensities of human males and females. But contrary to claims in a recent deluge of magazine articles, parental investment will not explain the particular panoply of supposed sexual differences so dear to pop psychology. For example, I do not believe that members of my gender are willing to rear babies only because clever females beguile us.’ (462)
- ‘I also have nipples not because I need them, but because women do and all humans share the same basic pathways of embryological development.’ (463)
- ‘If evolutionary psychologists continue to push the theory of parental investment as a central dogma, they will eventually suffer the fate of the Freudians, who had some good insights but failed spectacularly, and with serious harm upon millions of people (women, for example, who were labeled as ‘frigid’ when they couldn’t make the impossible physiological transition from clitoral to vaginal orgasm) because they elevated a limited guide into a rigid creed that became more of an untestable and unchangeable religion than a science.’ (463)
- notes that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy China
- ‘Human cultural change needn’t even follow genealogical lines – the most basic requirement of a Darwinian evolutionary process – for even the most distant cultural lineages can borrow from each other with ease. If we want a biological metaphor for cultural change, we should probably invoke infection rather than evolution. Second, casual: as argued above, human cultural change operates fundamentally in the Lamarckian mode, while genetic evolution remains firmly Darwinian. Lamarckian processes are so labile, so directional, and so rapid that they overwhelm Darwinian rates of change. Since Lamarckian and Darwinian systems work so differently, cultural change will receive only limited (and metaphorical) illumination from Darwinism.’ (464-465)
- ‘The human brain is the most complicated device for reasoning and calculating, and for expressing emotion, ever evolved on earth.’ (465)
- ‘Debates based on no evidence are among the most revealing in the history of science, for in the absence of factual constraints, the cultural biases that affect all thought (and which scientists try to assiduously to deny) lie nakedly exposed.’ (470)
- ‘The profession of philosophy followed no unsullied ideal of truth. Philosophers relied on state or religious patronage. Even if Plato did not consciously conspire to bolster the privileges of rulers with a supposedly abstract philosophy, his own class position encouraged an emphasis on thought as primary, dominating, and altogether more noble and important than the labor it supervised. This idealistic tradition dominated philosophy right through to Darwin Darwin
- ‘A bias must be recognized before it can be challenged. Cerebral primacy seemed so obvious and natural that it was accepted as given, rather than recognized as a deep-seated social prejudice related to the class position of professional thinkers and the patrons. Engels writes: ‘All merit for the swift advance of civilization was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men because accustomed to explain their actions from their thoughts, instead of from their needs… And so there arose in the course of time that idealistic outlook on the world which, especially since the downfall of the ancient world, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under that ideological influence they do not recognize the part that has been played therein by labor.’ The importance of Engel’s essay does not lie in the happy result that Australopithecus confirmed a specific theory proposed by him – via Haeckel – but rather in his perceptive analysis of the political role of science and of the social biases that must affect all thought.’ (471)
- ‘Although the legend surrounding Freud tends to downplay the continuity of his ideas with preexisting theories, and to view psychoanalysis as an abrupt and entirely novel contribution to human thought, Freud trained as a biologist in the heyday of evolution’s first discovery, and his theory sank several deep roots in the leading ideas of Darwin’s world. (See Frank J. Sulloway’s biography Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 1979, with its argument that nearly all creative geniuses become surrounded by a mythology of absolute originality.)’ (474)
- ‘Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), reiterates the same theme in a particular context. Moses, Freud argues, was an Egyptian who cast his lot with the Jews. Eventually his adopted parents killed him and, in their overwhelming guilt, recast him as a prophet of a single, all-powerful God, thus also creating the ethical ideals that lie at the heart of Judeo-Christian civilization.’ (475)
- ‘Ferenczi wrote a remarkable work titled Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924), perhaps best known today in mild ridicule for claiming that much of human psychology records our unrecognized yearning to return to the comforting confines of the womb… Ferenczi viewed sexual intercourse as an act of reversion toward a phyletic past in the tranquility of a timeless ocean – a ‘thalassal regressive trend… striving towards the aquatic mode of existence abandoned in primeval time.’ He interpreted the weariness of postcoital repose as symbolic of oceanic tranquility.’ (476-477)
- ‘Freud’s fantasy requires the passage to modern heredity of events that affected our ancestors only tens of thousands of years ago at most. But such events – anxiety at approaching ice sheets, castration of sons and murder of fathers – have no hereditary impact. However traumatic, such events do not affect the eggs and sperm of parents, and therefore cannot pass into heredity under Mendelian and Darwinian rules.’ (481)
- ‘Rewrite the Phylogenetic Fantasy to remove the literary hand of Freud’s masterly prose, put Joe Blow’s name on the title page, and no one will pay the slightest attention. We live in a world of privilege, and only great thinkers win a public right to fail greatly.’ (485)
- ‘Evolutionary theory swept away the creationist rug that had supported the intense debate between monogenists and polygenists, but it satisfied both sides by presenting an even better rationale for their shared racism. The monogenists continued to construct linear hierarchies of races according to mental and moral worth; the polygenists now admitted a common ancestry in the prehistoric mists, but affirmed that races had been separate long enough to evolve major inherited differences in talent and intelligence.’ (490)
- ‘Numbers and graphs do not gain authority from increasing precision of measurement, sample size, or complexity in manipulation. Basic experimental designs may be flawed and not subject to correction by extended repetition. Prior commitment to one among many potential conclusions often guarantees a serious flaw in design.’ (499)
- ‘Walter Freeman, dean of American lobotomists (he performed or supervised thirty-five hundred lesions of front portions of the brain before his retirement in 1970), admitted late in his career: ‘What the investigator misses most in the more highly intelligent individuals is their ability to introspect, to speculate, to philosophize, especially in regard to oneself… On the whole, psychosurgery reduces creativity, sometimes to the vanishing point.’ ’ (520)
- ‘The larger size of white brains was an unquestioned ‘facts’ among white scientists until quite recently.’ (530)
- ‘Eichmann recalled at his trial that the verbal discussions could not have been more direct: ‘What I know is that the gentlemen convened their session, and then in very plain terms – not in the language that I had to use in the minutes, but in absolutely blunt terms – they addressed the issue, with no mincing of words… The discussion covered killing, elimination, and annihilation.’ In an evasive first half, the Wannsee Protocol enumerates the Jewish population of Europe at some 11 million and then reviews the first two stages of action, now deemed unsuccessful and insufficient. At first, Hitler and company attempted ‘the expulsion of the News from every particular sphere of life of the German people’ – read Kristallnacht, confiscation, and terrorism. The second strategy stressed physical removal: ‘the expulsion of Jews from the living space (Lebensraum) of the German people.’ But Eichmann writes in the Wannsee Protocol, emigration spawned too many obstacles and had not worked fast enough: ‘Financial difficulties, such as the demand for increasing sums of money to be presented at the time of the landing on the part of various foreign governments, lack of shipping space, increasing restriction of entry permits, or canceling of such, extraordinarily increased the difficulties of emigration.’ On, then, to a third (and truly ultimate) ‘solution’ – kill them all. (In some sense, as so many others have noted, the most chilling aspect of the Wannsee Conference and Protocol, held to initiate and implement this third strategy, lies neither in Heydrich’s ability to conceptualize evil at such grand scale, nor in Eichmann’s propensities for composing plans in euphemistic bureaucratese, but in the painstaking and deliberate construction of detailed logistics for such an extensive undertaking – the careful calculation of railroad cars and their volumes, the siting of death camps at the hubs of transportation lines, complex efforts to mask the true intent by depicting genocide as relocation and forced labor.)’ (535)
- ‘Several thousand survived Auschwitz , and many have told their stories. But the pure death camps are less well known because virtually no one lived to remember. Two people survived at Belzec, three at Chelmno (M. Gilbert, The Holocaust). The final solution was always and only about murder – total and unvarnished.’ (536)
- ‘The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and therefore he also lost his place in the Paradise which he had created for himself. He became submerged in the race-mixture, he gradually lost his cultural ability till… he began to resemble more the subjected and aborigines than his ancestors… Blood-mixing, with the lowering of the racial level caused by it, is the sole cause of the dying-off of old cultures; for the people do not perish by lost wars but by the less of that force of resistance which is contained only in the pure blood. All that is not race in this world is trash.’ Hitler,Mein Kampf (537)
- ‘The text of the German legislation borrowed heavily from eugenical sterilization statues then on the books of several American states, and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.’ (542)
- ‘A scientist’s best defense against such misappropriation lies in a combination that may seem to mix two disparate traits, vigilance and humility: vigilance in combating misuses that threaten effectiveness (you don’t have to refute every kook who writes a letter to the local newspaper – time doesn’t permit – but how can we distinguish the young Hitler from ‘just another nut’?); humility in recognizing that science does not, and cannot in principle, find answers to moral questions.’ (543)
- ‘We are freighted by heritage, both biological and cultural, granting us capacity both for infinite sweetness and unspeakable evil. What is morality but the struggle to harness the first and suppress the second?’ (543)
- ‘Soapy Sam Wilberforce and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire gain their odd but sensible conjunction as illustrations of the two extremes that must be avoided – for Wilberforce denied evolution altogether and absolutely, while the major social theory that hindered industrial reform (and permitted conditions that led to such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire) followed the most overextended application of biological evolution to patterns of human history – the theory of ‘Social Darwinism’.’ (550)
- ‘Even the greatest of truths can be overextended by zealous and uncritical acolytes.’ (551)
- ‘Cultural variation is largely Lamarckian, and natural selection cannot determine the recent history of our technological societies.’ (552)
- ‘Social Darwinism often serves as a blanket term for any genetic or biological claim made about the inevitability (or at least the ‘naturalness’) of social inequalities among classes and sexes, or military conquests of one group by another.’ (553)
- ‘Social Darwinism: the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darin has perceived in plants and animals in nature… The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of ‘natural’ inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were ‘unfit’ and should not be aided’ in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success.’ Encyclopedia Britannica (553)
- ‘The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest… The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.’ John Rockefeller (559)
- ‘While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of wealth, business, industrial, and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.’ Carnegie (559-560) - ‘Indiana California Virginia United States California
- ‘… Eugenics Record Office, the semiofficial arm and repository of data for the eugenics movement in America
- ‘We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange it if could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices… It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Oliver Holmes, writing for Majority (566-567)
- ‘The campaign for forced eugenic sterilization in American reached its climax and height of respectability in 1927, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, upheld the Virginia sterilization bill in Buck v. Bell.’ (567)
- ‘We usually regard eugenics as a conservative movement and its most vocal critics as members of the left. This alignment has generally held in our own decade. But eugenics, touted in its day as the latest in scientific modernism, attracted many liberals and numbered among its most vociferous critics groups often labeled reactionary and antiscientific. If any political lesson emerges from these shifting alliances, we might consider the true inalienability of certain human rights.’ (567)
- ‘Some forms of mental deficiency are passed by inheritance in family lines, but most are not – a scarcely surprising conclusion when we consider the thousand shocks that beset us all during our lives, from abnormalities in embryonic growth to traumas of birth, malnourishment, rejection, and poverty.’ (568)
- ‘So Buck v. Bell remained for fifty years, a footnote to moment of American history perhaps best forgotten. Then, in 1980, it reemerged to prick our collective conscience, when Dr. K. Ray Nelson, then director of Lynchburg Hospital School of Law University of Virginia
- ‘Those scientists who study biological systems by breaking them down into ever smaller parts, until they reach the chemistry of molecules, often deride biologists who insist upon treating organisms as irreducible wholes. The two sides of this oversimplified dichotomy even have names, often invoked in a derogatory way by their opponents. The dissectors are ‘mechanists’ who believe that life is nothing more than the physics and chemistry of its component parts. The integrationists are ‘vitalists’ who hold that life and life alone has that ‘special something,’ forever beyond the reach of chemistry and physics and even incompatible with ‘basic’ science. In this reading you are, according to your adversaries, either a heartless mechanist or a mystical vitalist.’ (575)
- ‘I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break then into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgement of subtleties and intermediate positions – and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.’ (575)
- ‘The categories have changed today, but we are still either rightists or leftists, advocates of nuclear power of solar heating, pro choice or against the murder of fetuses. We are simply not allowed the subtlety of an intermediate view on intricate issues.’ (575)
- ‘This dichotomy is an absurd caricature of the opinions held by most biologists.’ (576)
- ‘The middle position holds that life, as a result of its structural and functional complexity, cannot be taken apart into chemical constituents and explained in its entirety by physical and chemical laws working at the molecular level. But the middle way denies just as strenuously that this failure of reductionism records any mystical properties of life, any special ‘spark’ that inheres in life alone. Life acquires its own principles from the hierarchical structure of nature. As levels of complexity mount along the hierarchy of atom, molecule, gene, cell, tissue, organism, and population, new properties arise as results of interactions and interconnections emerging at each new level. A higher level cannot be fully explained by taking it apart into component elements and rendering their properties in the absence of these interactions. Thus, we need new, or ‘emergent,’ principles to encompass life’s complexity; these principles are additional to, and consistent with, the physics and chemistry of atoms and molecules. This middle way may be designated ‘organizational,’ or ‘holistic’; it represents the stance adopted by most biologists and even by most physical scientists who have thought hard about biology and directly experienced its complexity.’ (576)
- ‘The direct analysis of the state of being alive must never go below the order of organization which characterizes life; it must confine itself to the combination of compounds in the life-unit, never descending to single compounds and, therefore, certainly never below these… The physicist aims at the least, the indivisible, particle of matter. The study of the state of being alive is confined that organization which is peculiar to it.’ Ernest Just (583)
- ‘One of my most eminent colleagues once told me that he regarded research as the greatest joy of all, for it was like continual orgasm.’ (586)
- ‘Evolution [is] both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief.’ (591)
- ‘… ‘scientific creationism’ – the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion… for no such conflict exists. Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States
- ‘Creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense either to Catholics or Jews, for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth, rather than illuminating literature based partly on metaphorical allegory.’ (591)
- ‘The Catholic Church values scientific study, views science as no threat to religion in general or Catholic doctrine in particular, and has long accepted both the legitimacy of evolution as a field of study and the potential harmony of evolutionary conclusions with Catholic faith.’ (593)
- ‘I then remembered the primary rule of intellectual life: When puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents.’ (593)
- ‘No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority – and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or ‘non-overlapping magisteria’). The net of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).’ (594)
- ‘Many of our deepest questions calls upon aspects of both magisteria for different parts of a full answer – and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do our genealogical ties with other organism imply about the meaning of human life?’ (594-595)
- ‘I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving, concordat between our magisteria – the NOMA concept. NOMA represents a principled position on moral on intellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility leads to important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.’ (601)
- ‘Religion is too important for too many people to permit any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology.’ (601)
- ‘Luther turned on his vitriol and, in a 1543 pamphlet titled On the Jews and Their Lies, recommended either forced deportation to Palestine, or the burning of all synagogues and Jewish books (including the Bible), and the restriction of Jews to agrarian pursuits.’ (607)
- ‘If the peasant is in open rebellion, then he is outside the law of God… Rebellion brings with it a land full of murders and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and turns everything upside down like a great disaster. Therefore, let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you don’t strike him, he will strike you, and the whole land with you.’ Martin Luther, Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants (608)
- ‘The victorious nobility followed Luther’s recommendations, and estimates of the death toll (mostly inflicted upon revels who had already surrendered and therefore posed no immediate threat) range to 100,000 people.’ (608)
- ‘I am quite happy to acknowledge that we have a biologically based capacity to categorize humans as insiders or outsiders, and then to view outsiders as beyond fellowship and ripe for slaughter. But where can such an argument take us in terms of modern moral discourse, or even social observation? For this claim is entirely empty and devoid of explanatory power. We gain nothing by speculating that a capacity for genocide lies within our evolutionary heritage.’ (613)
- ‘In 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted six to four to remove evolution, and the big bang theory as well, from the state’s science curriculum [reversed in 2000].’
- ‘Evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as firmly supported as the earth’s revolution around the sun. In this sense, we can call evolution a ‘fact’.’ (617)
- ‘No one who has not read the Bible or the Bard can be considered educated in Western traditions; similarly, no one ignorant of evolution can understand science.’ (618)
- ‘Our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert that absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.’ (621)
- ‘Ambulocetus is the very animal that creationists proclaimed impossible in theory… This sequential discovery of picture-perfect intermediacy in the evolution of whales stand as a triumph in the history of paleontology.’ (629)
- ‘We do not ask often enough why natural selection has homed in upon this particular optimum – and not another among a set of unrealized alternatives.’ (630)
No comments:
Post a Comment