The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that when analyzing crucial topics that deeply impact us, our judgments are often flawed.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote suggests that the significance of a subject can lead to potential errors in our understanding and analysis, particularly when those subjects resonate closely with our personal hopes and needs. The emotional weight of such topics can cloud our objectivity, thereby complicating our ability to create a clear framework for analysis. This serves as a reminder of the challenges we face when grappling with deeply important issues.
In practice
During a debate on healthcare reform, this quote can help underscore the complexity and emotional weight of the issues involved.
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.
And that is the secret of this world. If you remove love of dunya from your heart, the dunya is yours for the taking. You can have the dunya because it's in your hand and not in your heart
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.
A god's relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.
Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.
sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?
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