Brilliant quote. I'm curious what the source is. Many people seem to worship the trivial, take for granted the practical, and still miss that every life is priceless.
can't confirm but I think it's Stephen Jay Gould. I read it (or a variation of it) from another source that I can't remember a long time ago and it has stuck in my mind ever since
You're right on it. After a quick search: It is at the end of Chapter 13 "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds" of Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History". This, in turn, is the second out of a ten volume anthology of essays taken from the "This View of Life" column that he wrote for Natural History magazine.
The essay itself has to do with some racist and sexist history behind attempts to correlate "intelligence" with brain size and other bodily characteristics (particularly the work of Pierre Paul Broca and Edward Anthony Spitzka). Generally, by seeing oneself as "more" and others as "less", one can then rationalize "rewarding" the former and "punishing" the latter.
Brilliant quote. I'm curious what the source is. Many people seem to worship the trivial, take for granted the practical, and still miss that every life is priceless.
can't confirm but I think it's Stephen Jay Gould. I read it (or a variation of it) from another source that I can't remember a long time ago and it has stuck in my mind ever since
You're right on it. After a quick search: It is at the end of Chapter 13 "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds" of Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History". This, in turn, is the second out of a ten volume anthology of essays taken from the "This View of Life" column that he wrote for Natural History magazine.
The essay itself has to do with some racist and sexist history behind attempts to correlate "intelligence" with brain size and other bodily characteristics (particularly the work of Pierre Paul Broca and Edward Anthony Spitzka). Generally, by seeing oneself as "more" and others as "less", one can then rationalize "rewarding" the former and "punishing" the latter.