The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the dramatic and often perilous conditions associated with significant archaeological or field research locations.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote paints a vivid picture of the daunting and hazardous environments where important scientific discoveries often take place. It suggests that such locations are not just physically challenging, but also steeped in the mythos of adventure and danger, which can overshadow the genuine intellectual pursuit of knowledge and understanding in the field of science.
In practice
Discussing the challenges faced by archaeologists during a lecture on historical discoveries.
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.
We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
There was a magic about pulsars... no other things in the sky had such labels on them. Each one had its own distinct pulsing frequency, so it could be identified by anybody, including other creatures, after a long period of time and far, far away.
Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.
While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.
Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.
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