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3e54ae9
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What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.
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artists
sportsmen
seeing
inspirational
farmer
botanists
fossils
perspective
geologists
sight
flowers
game
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John Lubbock |
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71194de
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But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
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evolution
conclusion-before-evidence
intermediate-forms
missing-links
fossils
paleontology
fossil-record
macro-evolution
macroevolution
darwinism
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Charles Darwin |
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f02e977
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The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.
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living
outdated
fossils
language
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Antonio Gramsci |
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f80a855
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Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.
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time
mind
discovery
poetry
science
fossils
cuvier
discoverer
feeble
george-byron
george-gordon-byron
george-gordon-noel
george-gordon-noel-byron
georges-cuvier
historian
montmartre
treatise
urals
lord-byron
immensity
civilization
geology
space
genius
natural
turmoil
poet
memory
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Honoré de Balzac |