Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the artistic skill involved in reconstructing dinosaurs from fossils, comparing it to a biblical moment of transformation.
Stephen Jay Gould highlights the remarkable artistry of Charles R. Knight, who masterfully depicted dinosaurs through his reconstructions of their skeletal remains. By linking Knight's work to a profound biblical reference, Gould illustrates the blend of science and art in bringing to life creatures that once roamed the Earth, evoking both wonder and fear in our imaginations.
In practice
In a museum exhibit about dinosaurs, you could use this quote to discuss the artistry behind fossil reconstructions.
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.
The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.
Art is about trying to find the good in people, and making the world a more compassionate place.
No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.
Today, although as a whole, the industry is still male-dominated, more women are drawing comics than ever before, and there are more venues for them to see their work in print. In the 1950s, when the comic industry hit an all-time low, there was no place for women to go. Today, because of graphic novels, there's no place for aspiring women cartoonists to go but forward.
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