"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"Historical science is not worse, more restricted, or less capable of achieving firm conclusions because experiment, prediction, and subsumption under invariant laws of nature do not represent its usual working methods. The sciences of history use a different mode of explanation, rooted in the comparative and observational richness in our data. We cannot see a past event directly, but science is usually based on inference, not unvarnished observation (you don't see electrons, gravity, or black holes either)."
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Source: Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Book by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 279, 1989.
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