"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?"
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Source: An Urchin in the Storm. Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Cardboard Darwinism, p. 27, 1987.
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