We often think, naively, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress-just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures.

The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? The…

[A]lthough species may be discrete, they have no immutable essence. Variation is the raw material of evolutionary change. It represents the fundamental reality…

Siphonophores do not convey the message-a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism-that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected an…

All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

It is supposed that there has been progress in the science of textual criticism, and the most frivolous pretender has learned to talk superciliously about 'the…