We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. I mean, we're the animal that is best of all the animals at long-distance running. Why? It is quite amazing. Superfluous gifts you don't really need to survive.

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.

...the computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.