Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a … - Stephen Jay Gould

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There's something about being in front of a live audience that's fun. It's a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can't get it anywhere else. And I've been doing it since I was 23, so it's part of my being - it's part of my fabric as a person.

Stephen Jay Gould

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Block, Design, Progress, Encounter, Greatest

Same Author Quotes

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

Ability, Analogies, Fields, Genius

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Agents, Decency, Evolution, Keys, Organized, Skepticism

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Accident, Atheism, Human, Life Is, Religion, Result

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.

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Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

Benefit, Development, Environment, Evolution, Happens, Problem