Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.

But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees.

How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence