"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny."
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Source: Stephen Jay GOULD, Stephen Jay Gould (2009). “Punctuated Equilibrium”, p.83, Harvard University Press
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