“I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.”
Quote by Stephen Jay Gould
Author
You May Also Like
Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
“Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.”
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Source: Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history
Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History
“Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder - and turn quickly to my typewriter.”
Source: Pieces of Eight Pa
“A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.”
