Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Bones
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The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).
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I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me.
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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.
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The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
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Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.
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Related Authors
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Simon Conway Morris University Professor -
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Theodosius Dobzhansky Geneticist -
Alfred Russel Wallace Naturalist -
Michael Shermer Writer -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
Carl Linnaeus Botanist -
E. O. Wilson Biologist -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Ernst Haeckel Philosopher -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Oliver Sacks Neurologist -
Thomas Huxley Biologist -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Herbert Spencer Philosopher -
