People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.

All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.