"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution."
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Source: Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Evolution as Fact and Theory, pp. 254 - 55, 1983.
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