...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means to be born into a sarcastic universe.

Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the Universe to make sense!

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

Above all, TRIBES is fun, and even kind of sexy... in that every round features an Opportunity for Reproduction, which is the main aim of the game, as it is in most of Nature

I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.