History does not unfold along a line of progress, and the past was not just a bad old time to be superseded and rejected for its inevitable antiquity.
p 43
Thus Leonardo made his superb observations on fossils in order to validate his lovely, but ever so antiquated, view of a causally meaningful and precise unity between the human body as a microcosm and the earth as a macrocosm.
Huxley's famous remark about "a beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact." But single facts almost never slay worldviews, at least not right away (and properly so, for the majority of deeply anomalous observations turn out to be wrong).
Large, wide spread, and successful species tend to be especially stable. Humans fall into this category, and the historical record supports such a prediction. Human bodily form has not altered appreciably in 100,000 years. [...] the Cro-magnon cave painters are us—so why should their mental capacity differ from ours?
This collection of three [Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, surviving Homo erectus in Asia, and Homo sapiens continuing a relentless spread throughout the habitable world] might not match the richness of an African bush of some half a dozen species about 2 million years ago, but the conclusion that three human species still coexisted as recently as thirty to forty thousand years ago does require a major reassessment of conventional thinking.I have focused this essay upon one of the great unconscious biases—our persisting preference for viewing history as a tale of linear progress—that soften stymie our interpretations of evolution and the history of life on Earth. But we should also recognize this other, rather more "homey" or obvious bias—our tendency to view a comfortable and well-known current situation as a generality rather than a potential exception. Such an attitude also has a highfalutin name in the history of science—uniformitarianism, or using the present as a key to the past.
Consider the operative paragraph of the Edict of Worms [Charles V, May 8. 1521...]We want all of Luther's books to be universally prohibited and forbidden, and we also want them to be burned... We follow the very praiseworthy ordinance and custom of the good Christians of old who had the books of heretics like the Arians, Priscillians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and others burned and annihilated, even everything that was contained in these books, whether good or bad.
The net of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work that way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).
Truth just is, but error must have reasons.
Natural selection can only adapt each creature to its own local conditions—and such a mechanism therefore cannot serve as a rationale for our oldest and most pernicious prejudice of progress.