What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it... Eliminate one species, and another increases to take its place. Eliminate a great many species, and the local ecosystem starts to decay.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.

The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

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