The World Is Full Of Signals That

Asian Homo Erectus Died Without Issue And Does Not Enter Our Immediate Ancestry (for We Evolved From African Populations); Neanderthal People Were Collateral Cousins, Perhaps Already Living In Europe While We Emerged In Africa... In Other Words, We Are An Improbable And Fragile Entity, Fortunately Successful After Precarious Beginnings As A Small Population In Africa, Not The Predictable End Result Of A Global Tendency. We Are A Thing, An Item Of History, Not An Embodiment Of General Principles.

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.

I Am, Somehow, Less Interested In The Weight And Convolutions Of Einstein’s Brain Than In The Near Certainty That People Of Equal Talent Have Lived And Died In Cotton Fields And Sweatshops.

The Telephone Is The Greatest Single Enemy Of Scholarship; For What Our Intellectual Forebears Used To Inscribe In Ink Now Goes Once Over A Wire Into Permanent Oblivion.

People Are Storytelling Creatures. We Like Stories That Go Somewhere, And Therefore We Like Trends - Because Trends Are Things That Either Get Better Or Get Worse, So We Can Either Rejoice Or Lament. But We Mistakenly Depict Many Things As Trends Moving In Some Direction. We Take The "full House" Of Variation In A System And Try To Represent It As A Single Number, When In Fact What We Should Be Doing Is Studying The Variation As It Expands And Contracts. If You Look At The History Of The Variation In All Its Complexity, Then You See There's No Trend.