The Proof Of Evolution Lies In Those

We Should Take Comfort In Two Conjoined Features Of Nature: First, That Our World Is Incredibly Strange And Therefore Supremely Fascinating, Second, That However Bizarre And Arcane Our World Might Be, Nature Remains Potentially Comprehensible To The Human Mind.

Few Tragedies Can Be More Extensive Than The Stunting Of Life, Few Injustices Deeper Than The Denial Of An Opportunity To Strive Or Even To Hope, By A Limit Imposed From Without, But Falsely Identified As Lying Within.

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.

Life Is A Copiously Branching Bush, Continually Pruned By The Grim Reaper Of Extinction, Not A Ladder Of Predictable Progress.

We Debase The Richness Of Both Nature And Our Own Minds If We View The Great Pageant Of Our Intellectual History As A Compendium Of New Information Leading From Primal Superstition To Final Exactitude. We Know That The Sun Is Hub Of Our Little Corner Of The Universe, And That Ties Of Genealogy Connect All Living Things On Our Planet, Because These Theories Assemble And Explain So Much Otherwise Disparate And Unrelated Information Not Because Galileo Trained His Telescope On The Moons Of Jupiter Or Because Darwin Took A Ride On A Galápagos Tortoise.