“Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.”

— Stephen Jay Gould , book Eight Little Piggies

"A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 437–438
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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