Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
Interpretation
Writers are driven by an intrinsic motivation to learn and grow through their craft.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould emphasizes that a true writer does not merely write for external validation or recognition, but rather from an intrinsic desire to explore, understand, and learn more about the world around them. This internal drive fuels their writing and shapes their perspective, allowing them to express their evolving thoughts and ideas through the written word.
In practice
In a talk about the importance of writing, one might say, 'As Stephen Jay Gould noted, any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.'
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.
I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere's a research library and I can't get an elitist kick from it any more.
Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.
Our system rewards specific talents more than anything. I got pushed forward for having certain capacities. Others had their horizons systematically lowered for having capacities that our academic system had no use for. I've seen countless people lose heart and feel like they should settle for less, that they don't deserve abundance.
One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.
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