Unreasonable nature

At the entrance to the Franklin Park Zoo, in Boston. For decades it was a terrible place for animals but has been much improved in the last quarter century.

“The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. The psalmist did not distinguish himself as an acute observer when he wrote: ‘I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ The tyranny of what seems reasonable often impedes science. Who before Einstein would have believed that the mass and aging of an object could be affected by its velocity near the speed of light?’’

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science and Harvard professor, in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History.

Giant Panda.