The vigorous branching of life...
The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright.
If a man dies of cancer in fea...
If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.
When scientists need to explai...
When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.
Phony psychics like Uri Geller...
Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people.
We debase the richness of both...
We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a
Good scholars struggle to unde...
Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [...] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.
Each of the major sciences has...
Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
Few intellectual tyrannies can...
Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.
When we look to presumed sourc...
When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that 'brevity is the soul of wit' (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness.
A rare book at once of great i...
A rare book at once of great importance and wonderful to read.... Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology , recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.... A major addition to the scientific literature.
Antiessentialist thinking forc...
Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
The facts of nature are what t...
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies 'out there' in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transit
Siphonophores do not convey th...
Siphonophores do not convey the message a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected and interacting in some higher, ineffable harmony. Nature revels in boundaries and distinctions; we inhabit a universe of structure. But since our universe of structure has evolved historically, it must present us with fuzzy boundaries, where one kind of thing grades into another.
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Советских актёров часто ставят в пример как образец духовной силы, национальной гордости и внутренней красоты. Они стали символами эпохи, носителями культуры и нравственности. Но, как известно, за кул...
Десять кинозвезд, которые отлично поют
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Остаться на вершине в Голливуде удаётся не каждому, особенно если путь начался в детстве. Одни актёры теряются из-за...
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