What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
Interpretation
Life on Earth has been largely shaped by bacteria, showcasing their dominance throughout history.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote highlights the significant role that bacteria play in the history of life on Earth. It emphasizes that despite often being overlooked, these microorganisms have continuously influenced ecosystems, evolution, and the development of life itself, underscoring their fundamental importance in the biological world.
In practice
In a science lecture discussing ecosystems and microbiomes.
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 fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don't understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.
Rising carbon price is essential to 'decarbonize' the economy - to remove the nation towards the era beyond fossil fuels.
Science operates in the natural, not the supernatural. In fact, I go so far as to state that there is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal.
Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
The time has come to recognize that food, how we produce it, process it, package it, sell it, cook it and eat it, is as important as any other issue.
No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.