"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans."
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Source: Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.66, W. W. Norton & Company
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