"We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction"

This quote by Stephen Jay Gould speaks to the idea that people are not the unavoidable result of development, but rather an opportunity occurrence. He suggests that development does not have a specific goal in mind, and that human beings are not the expected result of the process. Rather, we are a marvelous mishap, a product of an unpredictable procedure. He further suggests that advancement does not have a drive to intricacy, which our ability to understand the mode of our own building is not something that development was striving for. Simply put, our existence is a pleased accident, and not the result of a predetermined strategy. This quote talks to the beauty and secret of the evolutionary process, and the fact that we are here regardless of the chances.