The Lying Stones of Marrakech : Penultimate Reflections in Natural History

1) ''Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi.
[I have observed that the farthest planet is threefold.]
I regard the last word of Galileo's anagram as especially revealing. He does not advocate his solution by saying 'I conjecture,' 'I hypothesize,' 'I infer,' or 'It seems to me that the best interpretation...' Instead, he boldly writes observavi---I have observed. No other word could capture, with such terseness and accuracy, the major change in concept and procedure (not to mention ethical valuation) that marked the transition to what we call 'modern' science. An older style (as found, for example, in Gesner's compendium on mammals, cited above) would not have dishonored a claim for direct observation, but would have evaluated such an argument as a corroborative afterthought, surely secondary in weight to such criteria as the testimony of classical authors and logical consistency with a conception of the universe 'known' to be both true and just---in other words, to authority and fixed 'reasonableness.'''

2) ''But Bacon presented a brilliant and original analysis by concentrating instead on psychological barriers to knowledge about the natural world. He had, after all, envisioned the study of nature as a funneling of sensory data through mental processors, and he recognized that internal barriers of the second stage could stand as high as the external impediments of sensory limitations. He also understood that the realm of conceptual hangups extended far beyond the cool and abstract logic of Aristotelian reason into our interior world of fears, hopes, needs, feelings, and the structural limits of mental machinery. Bacon therefore developed an incisive metaphor to classify these psychological barriers. He designated such impediments as 'idols' and recognized four major categories---idola tribus (idols of the tribe), idola specus (the cave), idola fori (the forum, or marketplace), and idola theatri (the theater).''

3) ''As Darwin wrote in my favorite quotation: 'How can anyone not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.'''

4) ''Second, human cultural change runs by the powerful mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Anything useful (or alas, destructive) that our generation invents can be passed directly to our offspring by direct education. Change in this rapid Lamarckian mode easily overwhelms the much slower process of Darwinian natural selection, which requires a Mendelian form of inheritance based on small-scale and undirected variation that can then be sifted and sorted through a struggle for existence. Genetic variation is Mendelian, so Darwinism rules biological evolution. But cultural variation is largely Lamarckian, and natural selection cannot determine the recent history of our technological societies.''

5) ''I find a particular intellectual beauty in such fractal [evolutionary] models---for they invoke hierarchies of inclusion (the single cove embedded within Acadia, embedded within Maine) to deny hierarchies of worth, importance, merit, or meaning. You may ignore Maine while studying the sand grain, and be properly oblivious to the grain while perusing the map of Maine on the single page of your atlas. But you can love and learn from both scales at the same time. Evolution does not lie patent in a clear pond on Trinidad any more than the universe (pace Mr. Blake) lies revealed in a grain of sand. But how poor would be our understanding---how bland and restricted our sight---if we could not learn to appreciate the rococo details that fill our immediate field of vision, while forming, at another scale, only some irrelevant and invisible jigglings in the majesty of geological time.''