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Stephen Jay Gould on “Jury-Rigged” Creatures

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (WW Norton & Co.: 1980), pp. 20-21.

Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design — nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution — paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.