"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past."
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Source: The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History. Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Only His Wings Remained, p. 54, 1985.
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