All Science Is Intelligent Inference; Excessive Literalism

I Emphatically Do Not Assert The General 'truth' Of This Philosophy Of Punctuational Change. Any Attempt To Support The Exclusive Validity Of Such A Grandiose Notion Would Border On The Nonsensical.

Iconography Becomes Even More Revealing When Processes Or Concepts, Rather Than Objects, Must Be Depicted For The Constraint Of A Definite "thing" Cedes Directly To The Imagination. How Can We Draw "evolution" Or "social Organization," Not To Mention The More Mundane "digestion" Or "self-interest," Without Portraying More Of A Mental Structure Than A Physical Reality? If We Wish To Trace The History Of Ideas, Iconography Becomes A Candid Camera Trained Upon The Scholar's Mind.

I Love To Read The Dedications Of Old Books Written In Monarchies For They Invariably Honor Some (usually Insignificant) Knight Or Duke With Fulsome Words Of Sycophantic Insincerity, Praising Him As The Light Of The Universe (in Hopes, No Doubt, For A Few Ducats To Support Future Work); This Old Practice Makes Me Feel Like Such An Honest And Upright Man, By Comparison, When I Put A Positive Spin, Perhaps Ever So Slightly Exaggerated, On A Grant Proposal.

Good Scholars Struggle To Understand The World In An Integral Way (pedants Bite Off Tiny Bits And Worry Them To Death). These Visions Of Reality [...] Demand Our Respect, For They Are An Intellectual's Only Birthright. They Are Often Entirely Wrong And Always Flawed In Serious Ways, But They Must Be Understood Honorably And Not Subjected To Mayhem By The Excision Of Patches.

Wind Back The Tape Of Life To The Early Days Of The Burgess Shale; Let It Play Again From An Identical Starting Point, And The Chance Becomes Vanishingly Small That Anything Like Human Intelligence Would Grace The Replay.