All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
Interpretation
Variation is fundamental to evolution, and understanding it requires immersing oneself in its complexities.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould emphasizes that the essence of nature lies in the diversity of life forms. He suggests that to truly grasp the principles of evolution, one must engage directly with the variations present in biological species, highlighting the importance of diversity in the evolutionary process.
In practice
In a lecture on evolution, a teacher might quote Gould to illustrate the importance of biodiversity.
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.
Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.
Based on the science, you can make somewhat clear statements: The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep without impairment is zero.
A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed.
If spiritual science is to do the same for spirit that natural science has done for nature, it must investigate quite differently from the latter. It must find ways and means of penetrating into the sphere of the spiritual, a domain which cannot be perceived with outer physical senses nor apprehended with the intellect which is bound to the brain.
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