"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise."
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Source: Eight Little Piggies. Book by Stephen Jay Gould, A Foot Soldier for Evolution, p. 441, 1993.
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