Go Spandrels! The Spandrel paper came out of Harvard in 1979 when I was in Grad School across the river in Not-Harvard. It summed up everything about the other place: the easy intellectualism, the obscure language, the counter-intuitive message and its broad utility. "B'god Whistler, I wish I'd said that" etc etc Later on it was realised, with point scoring joy, that Gould and Lewontin's understanding of medieval church architecture was really superficial: heck'n'jiminy, the things they described weren't even "spandrels" but rather "pendentives". That's missing the point; which is that our understanding of evolution is super-superficial. Equivalent to what JBS Haldane said "My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose". Unknown unknowns at ever turn.
Go Spandrels! The Spandrel paper came out of Harvard in 1979 when I was in Grad School across the river in Not-Harvard. It summed up everything about the other place: the easy intellectualism, the obscure language, the counter-intuitive message and its broad utility. "B'god Whistler, I wish I'd said that" etc etc Later on it was realised, with point scoring joy, that Gould and Lewontin's understanding of medieval church architecture was really superficial: heck'n'jiminy, the things they described weren't even "spandrels" but rather "pendentives". That's missing the point; which is that our understanding of evolution is super-superficial. Equivalent to what JBS Haldane said "My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose". Unknown unknowns at ever turn.
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