"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"[T]ruly grand and powerful theories [...] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [...] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo. You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly."
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Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. Book by Stephen Jay Gould, Mr. Sophia's Pony, p. 155, 1998.
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