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I... praise the newly opened halls of fossil mammals at the . ...teaching us about evolutionary trees by organizing the entire hall as a central trun… - Stephen Jay Gould
" "I... praise the newly opened halls of fossil mammals at the . ...teaching us about evolutionary trees by organizing the entire hall as a central trunk and set of branches... placing our brains in our feet and letting us learn by walking. ...the chosen geometry of evolutionary organization... violates the traditional picture of life's history, thus illustrating... an important principle in the history of science: the central role of pictures, graphs, and other forms of visual representation in channeling and constraining our thought. ...Words are an evolutionary afterthought. ...My colleagues have actually done it. ...They have ordered all the fossils into an unconventional iconographic tree that fractures the bias of progress. ...so that we can preambulate along the tree of life and absorb the new scheme viscerally by walking... They have taken Colbert's radical idea and arranged all the fossils by their branching order, not their later "success" or "advancement." Groups that branch early appear early in the hall... Sea cows and elephants are at the end of the hall, horses in the middle, and primates near the beginning.
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About Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American geologist, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and popular-science author, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.
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Additional quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
Substantial changes, introduced during the last half of the 20th century, have built a structure so expanded beyond the original Darwinian core, and so enlarged by new principles of macroevolutionary explanation, that the full exposition, while remaining within the domain of Darwinian logic, must be construed as basically different from the canonical theory of natural selection, rather than simply extended.
If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?
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Geoffrey also recognized that the opposite orientations of gut and nervous system posed a problem for his claim that insects and vertebrates represent different versions of the same archetypal animal - and he proposed the first account of the inversion theory to resolve this threat to unification. ...Geoffroy pursued the... aim of establishing a "unity of type" that could generate both arthropods and vertebrates from the same basic blueprint. ...The single grand design includes a gut in the middle and the main nerve cords somewhere on the periphery.
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