Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look … - Stephen Jay Gould

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Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain, the enjoying of something I am in great trouble for till I have it.

Stephen Jay Gould

Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.

Horse, Horses, People, Scratch, Starting, Time

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

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

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Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

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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.

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