Quote #64

When Bonner writes that 'natural selection for optimal feeding is then presumed to be the cause of non-motility in all forms,' I can't help suspecting that some plants might do even better if they could walk from shade to sun-but the inherited constraints of design never permitted a trial of this intriguing option.

More from Stephen Jay Gould

  1. [E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. …
  2. Bowing to the reality of harried lives, Rudwick recognizes that not everyone will read every word of the meaty second section; he even expl…
  3. The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most 'things' now done by our …
  4. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of t…
  5. Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hope…
  6. As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from…
  7. I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve cre…
  8. [A]s we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from cra…

All Stephen Jay Gould quotes