"And yet I think that the Full House model does teach us to treasure variety for its own sake—for tough reasons of evolutionary theory and nature's ontology, and not from a lamentable failure of thought that accepts all beliefs on the absurd rationale that disagreement must imply disrespect. Excellence is a range of differences, not a spot. Each location on the range can be occupied by an excellent or an inadequate representative—and we must struggle for excellence at each of these varied locations. In a society driven, often unconsciously, to impose a uniform mediocrity upon a former richness of excellence—where McDonald's drives out the local diner, and the mega-Stop & Shop eliminates the corner Mom and Pop—an understanding and defense of full ranges as natural reality might help to stem the tide and preserve the rich raw material of any evolving system: variation itself."
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Academics from the United StatesSkepticsScience authors from the United StatesPaleontologists from the United StatesGeologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Chapter 15, “An Epilog on Human Culture” (p. 230)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American geologist, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and popular-science author, who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.
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