The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

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

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

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

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.