Nothing Is More Dangerous Than A Dogmatic

Contingency Is A Thing Unto Itself, Not The Titration Of Determinism By Randomness.

Life Is A Copiously Branching Bush, Continually Pruned By The Grim Reaper Of Extinction, Not A Ladder Of Predictable Progress.

Words Change Their Meanings, Just As Organisms Evolve. We Would Impose An Enormous Burden On Our Economy If We Insisted On Payment In Cattle Every Time We Identified A Bonus As A Pecuniary Advantage (from The Latin Pecus , Or Cattle, A Verbal Fossil From A Former Commercial Reality).

Human Consciousness Arose But A Minute Before Midnight On The Geological Clock. Yet We Mayflies Try To Bend An Ancient World To Our Purposes, Ignorant Perhaps Of The Messages Buried In Its Long History. Let Us Hope That We Are Still In The Early Morning Of Our April Day.

Something Deep Within Us Drives Accurate Messiness Into The Neat Channels Of Canonical Stories.