Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
Interpretation
Gould reflects on the challenges paleontologists face in studying evolution due to the limitations of fossil data.
In this quote, Stephen Jay Gould expresses the irony that although paleontologists see themselves as the primary interpreters of the history of life on Earth, they often struggle with the inadequacies of fossil evidence. He points out that in trying to uphold the theory of evolution by natural selection, they might overlook or misinterpret vital details because they perceive their data to be limited or flawed, thereby challenging their understanding of the very processes they aim to study.
In practice
This quote could be used in a science class to highlight the challenges of interpreting fossil records.
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.
If what the science tells us about climate change is correct, then unabated it will result in catastrophic consequences for our world.
I believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.
Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so.
I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.
Imagine being able to predict and prevent cancer before it starts. If we gather the world's talent and expertise in a committed, targeted effort, great progress is possible.
For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.
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