14~15p. ..Psychologists have studied this, by the way, the sweet salve that collecting can offer in times of anguish. In Collecting: An Unruly Passion, psychologist Werner Muensterberger, who counseled compulsive collectors for decades, notes that the habit often kicks into high gear after some sort of "deprivation or loss or vulnerability," with each new acquisition flooding the collector with an intoxicating burst of "fantasized omnipotence." Francisca López-Torrecillas, who has been studying collectors for years at the University of Granada, noted a similar phenomenon, that people experiencing stress or anxiety would turn to collecting to soothe their pain. "When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency," she writes, "compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better." The only danger, Muensterberger warns, is that—as with any compulsion—there seems to be a line where the habit can switch from "exhilarating" to "ruinous." - P-1
25p. ..Indeed, in his writings Agassiz is clear: he believes that every single species is a "thought of God," and that the work of taxonomy is to literally "translat[e] into human language... the thoughts of the Creator." - P-1
42p. ...Darwin had observed so much variety in creatures traditionally assumed to be one species that his sense of a hard line between species had slowly begun to dissolve . Even that most sacred line, the supposed inability of different species to create fertile offspring, he realized was bunk. "It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile," Darwin writes, "or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation." Leading him finally to declare that species—and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believed to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our "convenience." "Natura non facit saltum," he writes. Nature doesn‘t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines. - P-1
64p. ..There are things in this world that are real. That do not need our words to be real. - P-1
65p. ..One important rule about holotypes. If one is ever lost, you cannot simply swap a new specimen into the holy jar. No, that loss is honored, mourned, marked. The species line is forever tarnished, left without its maker. A new specimen will be chosen to serve as the physical representative of the species, but it is demoted to the lowly rank of "neotype." - P-1
90p. ...He says that the problem with spending one‘s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution—those sacred ions that could make you feel so many wonderful sensations and solve so many scientific puzzles—and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally "die while the body is still alive." - P-1
146p. ..This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see. There is no ladder. Natura non facit saltum, he cries in his scientist‘s tongue. There are no "jumps." The rungs we see are figments of our imagination, more about "convenience" than truth. To Darwin, a parasite was not an abomination but a marvel. A case of extraordinary adaptability. The sheer range of creatures in existence, great and small, feathered and glowing, goitered and smooth, was proof that there are endless ways of surviving and thriving in this world. - P-1
158~159p. ..I wanted to have some amazing retort. Some grandstandy way of telling him how wrong he was. That we matter, we matter. But as soon as I‘d feel my fist lifting, my brain would tug it back. Because of course, we don‘t. We don‘t matter. This is the cold truth of the universe . We are specks, flickering in and out of existence, with no significance to the cosmos. To ignore this truth is, oddly enough, to behave exactly like David Starr Jordan, whose ridiculous belief in his own superiority allowed him to perpetrate such unthinkable violence. No, to be clear-eyed and Good was to concede with every breath, with every step, our insignificance. To say otherwise was to sin, to lie, to march oneself off toward delusion, madness, or worse. - P-1
162p. ..To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it‘s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it‘s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it‘s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas. ..And so it must be with humans, with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one‘s darkest years. ..This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature‘s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the "whole machinery of life." The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend. - P-1
191p. ..The best way of ensuring that you don‘t miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt.... - P-1
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