I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.

The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

People would rather believe than know.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.