It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary Biologist To Write About Extinction Caused By Human Stupidity. Let Me Then Float An Unconventional Plea, The Inverse Of The Usual Argument. The Extinction Of Partula Is Unfair To Partula. That Is The Conventional Argument, And I Do Not Challenge Its Primacy. But We Need A Humanistic Ecology As Well, Both For The Practical Reason That People Will Always Touch People More Than Snails Do Or Can, And For The Moral Reason That Humans Are Legitimately The Measure Of All Ethical Questions For These Are Our Issues, Not Nature's.

-Stephen Jay Gould

Please Wait....
Translating....

It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary

Stephen Jay Gould

It Is So Hard For An Evolutionary Biologist To Write About Extinction Caused By Human Stupidity. Let Me Then Float An Unconventional Plea, The Inverse Of The Usual Argument. The Extinction Of Partula Is Unfair To Partula. That Is The Conventional Argument, And I Do Not Challenge Its Primacy. But We Need A Humanistic Ecology As Well, Both For The Practical Reason That People Will Always Touch People More Than Snails Do Or Can, And For The Moral Reason That Humans Are Legitimately The Measure Of All Ethical Questions For These Are Our Issues, Not Nature's.

Topic

Writing

Issues

Ethical Questions

Few Intellectual Tyrannies Can Be More Recalcitrant Than The Truths That Everybody Knows And Nearly No One Can Defend With Any Decent Data (for Who Needs Proof Of Anything So Obvious). And Few Intellectual Activities Can Be More Salutary Than Attempts To Find Out Whether These Rocks Of Ages Might Crumble At The Slightest Tap Of An Informational Hammer.

Data

Rocks

Intellectual