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.
The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It's not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.
It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.
...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.
If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.
No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.
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