WvB: Once more into the breach!

[Burgess, John]

Jody Porter says of WvB, among other mostly-non-contentious <G> points:   
  

     >3. "Nature does not know extinction..." Incredible!
     >This is almost too precious! In five words he frames
     >the entire neo-Darwinian debate:  Nature does not know
     >anything. It's blind- completely without concern for
     >the particular twists and turns of evolution, includ>ing the   
     >"detour" of self-conscious awareness. Of
     >course, if nature were to know something, it WOULD be
     >extinction. 99.9 % of all species are gone. If there
     >is anything nature seems to love, it's extinction.
     >With five words von Braun denies nature the pleasure
     >of its own favorite act. But Wernher actually did 
     >spout such nonsense, and with a straight face. God
     >only knows if he really believed it (or anything else,
     >for that matter). His idealization of "Nature" and
     >"Science" and his attestation of their truths, might
     >just as well be coming from the lips of Zarathustra.
     
Alas, I think you missed the poetry here!  vB isn't saying that "nothing 
ever died out," he's saying that "nothing is completely forgotten, EVEN 
IF it's no longer among the living."

While many species, even genera have gone extinct, vB is saying -- or so 
I construe him to say -- that the forms and content, the evolutionary 
steps (faltering as they may be), are not obliterated.  New species 
develop using older "technologies" in new ways.  While "ontogeny" may not 
recapitulate "phylogeny," nature does seem conservative in many ways. 

As another way of saying "there's nothing new under the sun," WvB may 
need to work on his metaphors (he's got plenty of time, now).  But I 
don't think he quite deserved this waxing.