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.
I know I'm not the kind of music that's going to have tons of screaming fans, and I'm not gonna be everyone's cup of tea. I just want to do as good a job as I can.
Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
I am very attracted by bad taste-it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of looking at things.
A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.
A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.
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