The vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven't even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?

That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.