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.

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

We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.

Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes.

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.

If you want to make a [rhubarb] pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe.