What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
Interpretation
Life on Earth has been largely shaped by bacteria, showcasing their dominance throughout history.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote highlights the significant role that bacteria play in the history of life on Earth. It emphasizes that despite often being overlooked, these microorganisms have continuously influenced ecosystems, evolution, and the development of life itself, underscoring their fundamental importance in the biological world.
In practice
In a science lecture discussing ecosystems and microbiomes.
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.
Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology.
The invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that.
Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.
You can't turn on your television without seeing these advertisements about clean coal, clean tar sands and the claim that there's more jobs associated with fossil fuels than other industries. That's of course not true. But they're hammering that into the voters' heads.
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