“Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.” BelieveReasonAnimalHalfTheoryThousandTenCreaturesDoctorsJungleAntsBlueprintsGiraffe Book:The collected poems of John Ciardi Source: The collected poems of John Ciardi
“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.” MayHas BeensBookLastsCertainForceNaturalHalfAcceptingEnvironmentImagineInfluenceExampleDesignMaterialsTheoryEvolutionCampaignsLocalsDozenSelectionMisunderstandingAdaptationVariationNatural SelectionArthurRejectingRaw MaterialsConductingDarwinismGood DesignCapricious Author:Stephen Jay Gould
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” WarHalfWindTheoryHundredLondonOperationsBombsDelusionNaziNaiveReapWhirlwindWarsawRotterdam Author:Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet
“Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.” TurnsGrowsHalfLibertyDemocracyProduceTheoryBirthMassUniversalEncouragementSlaveryRateWitSecureAssuranceDeliberateSuffrageIgnobleUniversal SuffrageBirth RatePopular Education Author:H. L. Mencken
“We know that acid rain has had no significant environmental effect on trees or forests in the United States... It is based on popular myths and half-baked theories.” KnowsStatesUnitedHalfUnited StatesTreeEffectsTheoryRainEnvironmentalMythSignificantForestsAcidAcid Rain Author:Haley Barbour
“I had a great deal of independence from the president and the White House during the entirety of my five years. And I'm not sure exactly what that is, but our friend, Walter Dellinger, has a theory about it, and I think he's probably right. And the theory starts with the fact that I worked in the White House for a year and a half before coming over to the position of SG. And because of that, when I was nominated, there was some chatter out there that, "Oh. They're putting a political hack in. This has never happened before."” ThinkingYearsFactsPoliticalHousePresidentWhiteDealsHalfFiveHappenedPositionTheoryIndependenceNot SureFive YearsWhite HouseHacksChatterEntirety Author:Donald Verrilli Jr.