Seek with enough conviction aforethought and ye shall find. - Stephen Jay Gould

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.

Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between “external” forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and “internal” forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development—what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called “laws of form.”