Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if … - Stephen Jay Gould

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We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it. . . . I suspect that deep inthe memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.

Stephen Jay Gould

Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).

Bonus, Enormous, Latin, Pecus, Reality

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If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

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Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Agents, Decency, Evolution, Keys, Organized, Skepticism

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Accident, Atheism, Human, Life Is, Religion, Result

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.

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Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

Benefit, Development, Environment, Evolution, Happens, Problem