Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into two categories: items purchasable for supposed pleasure (such as alcohol), and illicit drugs.
Stephen Jay GouldSome evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Stephen Jay Gould[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
Stephen Jay GouldMy own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.
Stephen Jay GouldPaleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
Stephen Jay GouldDarwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.
Stephen Jay Gould