The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the dramatic and often perilous conditions associated with significant archaeological or field research locations.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote paints a vivid picture of the daunting and hazardous environments where important scientific discoveries often take place. It suggests that such locations are not just physically challenging, but also steeped in the mythos of adventure and danger, which can overshadow the genuine intellectual pursuit of knowledge and understanding in the field of science.
In practice
Discussing the challenges faced by archaeologists during a lecture on historical discoveries.
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.
Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
I suggest that going to Mars means permanence on the planet - a mission by which we are building up a confidence level to become a two-planet species.
It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.
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