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Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most “modern” evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of “Neo-Darwinism.”
--
"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 54

 

Stephen Jay Gould

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One of my many favorite tattoos I’ve seen of myself is from a photo shoot I did for the cover of a compilation called Punk Fiction that came out in the 90s. And my friend who was putting it together asked me to re-create the movie poster for Pulp Fiction with me in place of Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace on the bed smoking a cigarette with the wig on and everything. So I went in and did that and it was the cover of the record and posters were made. Since then I’ve seen a portrait tattoo of me as Mia Wallace. That’s my favorite. And that was years before I was publicly dressing as a woman, which I’ve been doing for years now onstage and off. I think Mia Wallace was just one of my earlier excuses to strut around in women’s clothing.

 

Davey Havok

 

Now Albert had heard about lions,
How they was ferocious and wild;
And to see Wallace lying so peaceful,
Just didn't seem right to the child.

So straightway the brave little feller,
Not showing a morsel of fear,
Took his stick with the 'orses 'ead 'andle,
And shoved it in Wallace's ear.

 

Marriott Edgar

 

Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.

 

Denise Levertov

 

Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating.

 

Steve Sailer

 

The progress of human knowledge depends on maintaining that touch of scepticism even about the most "unquestionable" truths. A century ago, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was regarded as scientifically unshakeable; today, most biologists have their reservations about it. Fifty years ago, Freud's sexual theory of neurosis was accepted by most psychiatrists; today, it is widely recognized that his methods were highly questionable. At the turn of this century, a scientist who questioned Newton's theory of gravity would have been regarded as insane; twenty years later, it had been supplanted by Einstein's theory, although, significantly, few people actually understood it. It seems perfectly conceivable that our descendants of the twenty-second century will wonder how any of us could have been stupid enough to have been taken in by Darwin, Freud or Einstein.

 

Colin Wilson