Stephen Jay Gould Quirky Quotations

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role.