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I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things worked, we took them apart. If you try to take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of subject, a different class of matter; "life," something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God-given-and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
-Douglas Adams The Salmon of Doubt
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