I Can Envision Observations And Experiments That

I Strongly Reject Any Conceptual Scheme That Places Our Options On A Line, And Holds That The Only Alternative To A Pair Of Extreme Positions Lies Somewhere Between Them. More Fruitful Perspectives Often Require That We Step Off The Line To A Site Outside The Dichotomy.

The More Important The Subject And The Closer It Cuts To The Bone Of Our Hopes And Needs, The More We Are Likely To Err In Establishing A Framework For Analysis.

At A Minimum, In Explaining Evolutionary Pathways Through Time, The Constraints Imposed By History Rise To Equal Prominence With The Immediate Advantages Of Adaptation.

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 Cities And Without Human Interference.

I Like To Summarize What I Regard As The Pedestal-smashing Messages Of Darwin's Revolution In The Following Statement, Which Might Be Chanted Several Times A Day, Like A Hare Krishna Mantra, To Encourage Penetration Into The Soul: Humans Are Not The End Result Of Predictable Evolutionary Progress, But Rather A Fortuitous Cosmic Afterthought, A Tiny Little Twig On The Enormously Arborescent Bush Of Life, Which, If Replanted From Seed, Would Almost Surely Not Grow This Twig Again, Or Perhaps Any Twig With Any Property That We Would Care To Call Consciousness.