History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that history uses the process of evolution to organize and understand biological changes over time.
Stephen Jay Gould emphasizes the integral relationship between history and evolution, indicating that historical events in biology are mapped and understood through the lens of evolutionary theory. By framing biological changes in a temporal context, we can better appreciate how species evolve and adapt over time, thereby gaining insights into nature’s complexity and the processes that drive life on Earth.
In practice
In a biology lecture discussing how historical contexts have shaped evolutionary pathways.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some 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?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Our goal is not to completely eradicate the infection - that would be very difficult - but to produce a vaccine that will prevent not infection but disease. I think this is more possible.
I think we're just scratching the surface. One of the most exciting aspects of 23andMe is that we're enabling you to watch a revolution unfold live during your lifetime, and I think that the decoding of the genome, in my opinion, is the most fascinating discovery of our lifetime, and you get to be part of it.
All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.
When a coil is operated with currents of very high frequency, beautiful brush effects may be produced, even if the coil be of comparatively small dimensions. The experimenter may vary them in many ways, and, if it were nothing else, they afford a pleasing sight.
Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent.
Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
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