Biology has finally opened up to achieve a unifying embrace of all its disciplines. We're seeing the renaissance of what could be called scientific natural history, which makes available the groundwork - the foundation work - of what is actually on the Earth.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.

No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.

People must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obligated by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.