I voted up both Newton quotes because they show how a very smart man can make a very plausible argument which is nevertheless very wrong. And the reason Newton failed to guess the rather simple explanation is that he observed a solar system that was stable and unchanging and assumed that it must always have been stable and unchanging since the creation. His "biases" just didn't allow him to imagine an evolutionary model of planet formation by accretion from a more-or-less random initial state. Nowadays of course, we tend to invent evolutionary or historical explanations for everything. We don't even limit ourselves to explaining the origins. We go on to predict how things will likely come to a contingent historical end ... or should I refer to it as our next great adventure?

Numberplates?