Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle

Gould is one of the very few science writers who doesn’t feel constrained by the limits of pure rationality and understand metaphor has a purpose, myth is not “just a story” and, perhaps not coincidentally, is able to spin a hell of a story.

To quote Wikipedia, which for once has something pretty decent to say, “Gould has recognized that mental constructs (metaphors, analogies, personal philosophies, imaginative leaps)—not empirical discoveries—are what bring about scientific advance. “Facts” are so embedded in a paradigm that they simply do not have the kind of independent probative power they were once thought to possess.”