“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).”

— Stephen Jay Gould, book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1070

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Stephen Jay Gould274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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“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).”

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Stephen Jay Gould274

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