"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome."
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Source: Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Evolution as Fact and Theory, pp. 254 - 55, 1983.
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