We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

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

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

I like what Abba Eban once said during the 1967 war. He said, "When all else fails, men turn to reason."

The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.

Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named.