"Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection... Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence."
Stephen Jay Gould

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

Sources

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 328

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould