The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.

An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

We use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.

The solutions like freezing zygotes, fertilized eggs, of all kinds of animals and so on, or keeping them in zoos and having arboreta where we have trees, all these things have been promoted. Even getting the complete genetic code of various fishes so we can let them pass away and then we'll pull them back. That is science fiction run amok.

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.