We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvemen… - Stephen Jay Gould

Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.

La nueva interpretación de la fauna de Burguess Shale es una de las transformaciones más invisibles por dos razones básicas, pero su capacidad para modificar nuestra concepción de la vida no puede ser igualada por ningún otro descubrimiento paleontológico.

Gaskell... had to keep his stately soldiers upright and uniformly oriented... by crafting the brain and spinal cord from an arthropod digestive tube, while forming a completely new gut below. ...Gaskell thought that his move would rescue the theory of linear progress, with its necessary transition of arthropod into vertebrate, from the absurdities of the old inversion theory.