Dave Mahoney

“...we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet..we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again...the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being "open to revision.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“Darwin had observed so much variety in creatures traditionally assumed to be one species that his sense of a hard line between species had slowly begun to dissolve. Even that most sacred line, the supposed inability of different species to create fertile offspring, he realized was bunk. “It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile,” Darwin writes, “or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation.” Leading him finally to declare that species—and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believe to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our “convenience.” “Natura non facet salute,” he writes. Nature doesn’t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“The true path to progress is paved not with certainty but with doubt, with being 'open to revision.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“And then there was that key point in On the Origin of Species. That crucial point that somehow both David and before him Francis Galton had missed. What does Darwin say is the best way of building a strong species, of allowing it to endure into the future, to withstand the blows of Chaos in all her mighty forms—flood, drought, rising sea levels, fluctuating temperatures, invasions of competitors, predators, pests?

Variation. Variation in genes, and hence in behavior and physical traits. Homogeneity is a death sentence. To rid a species of its mutants and outliers is to make that species dangerously vulnerable to the elements.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life