Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be … - Stephen Jay Gould

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.

Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut.

Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.