"Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."
"We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating, second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind."
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Source: Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History. Book by Stephen Jay Gould. A Special Fondness for Beetles, pp. 386-387, 1995.
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