“Unfortunately, all life on earth - the only life we know - represents, for all its current variety, the results of a single experiment, for every earthly species evolved from the common ancestry of a single origin. We desperately need a repetition of the experiment (several would be better, but let's not be greedy!) in order to make a judgement. Mars represents our first real hope for a second experiment - the sine qua non”

—  Stephen Jay Gould, book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

for any proper answer for the question of questions.
"War of the Worldviews", p. 353
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

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Stephen Jay Gould274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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