There Is No Gene "for" Such Unambiguous

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.

I Contend That The Continued Racial Classification Of Homo Sapiens Represents An Outmoded Approach To The General Problem Of Differentiation Within A Species. In Other Words, I Reject A Racial Classification Of Humans For The Same Reasons That I Prefer Not To Divide Into Subspecies The Prodigiously Variable West Indian Land Snails That Form The Subject Of My Own Research.

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.

It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary Biologist To Write About Extinction Caused By Human Stupidity. Let Me Then Float An Unconventional Plea, The Inverse Of The Usual Argument. The Extinction Of Partula Is Unfair To Partula. That Is The Conventional Argument, And I Do Not Challenge Its Primacy. But We Need A Humanistic Ecology As Well, Both For The Practical Reason That People Will Always Touch People More Than Snails Do Or Can, And For The Moral Reason That Humans Are Legitimately The Measure Of All Ethical Questions For These Are Our Issues, Not Nature's.

The History Of Life Is More Adequately Represented By A Picture Of 'punctuated Equilibria' Than By The Notion Of Phyletic Gradualism. The History Of Evolution Is Not One Of Stately Unfolding, But A Story Of Homeostatic Equilibria, Disturbed Only 'rarely' (i.e. Rather Often In The Fullness Of Time) By Rapid And Episodic Events Of Speciation.