"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most "obvious," "accurate," and "natural" style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement."
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Source: Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.72, Harvard University Press
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