Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the artistic skill involved in reconstructing dinosaurs from fossils, comparing it to a biblical moment of transformation.
Stephen Jay Gould highlights the remarkable artistry of Charles R. Knight, who masterfully depicted dinosaurs through his reconstructions of their skeletal remains. By linking Knight's work to a profound biblical reference, Gould illustrates the blend of science and art in bringing to life creatures that once roamed the Earth, evoking both wonder and fear in our imaginations.
In practice
In a museum exhibit about dinosaurs, you could use this quote to discuss the artistry behind fossil reconstructions.
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.
It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.
If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It's the ultimate hustle.
Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.
I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.
Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.
Films are neither true nor false. That includes my films, as well as others. They may make claims that are true or false, but films are too complex. They have too many ingredients.
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