We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature. - Stephen Jay Gould

But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

Nature has no automatically transferable wisdom to serve as the basis of human morality. Passive observation and unquestioned reverence for nature are no substitute for ethical philosophy.