People under assault, and hopelessly overmatched, often do the opposite of what propriety might suggest: they dig in when they ought to accommodate. … - Stephen Jay Gould

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Creative thought in science is exactly this - not a mechanical collection on of facts and intuition, bias, and insight from other fields. Science, at its best, interposes human judgement and ingenuity upon all proceedings. It is, after all (although we sometimes forget it), practiced by humans.

Siphonophores do not convey the message—a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism—that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected and interacting in some higher, ineffable harmony. Nature revels in boundaries and distinctions; we inhabit a universe of structure. But since our universe of structure has evolved historically, it must present us with fuzzy boundaries, where one kind of thing grades into another.