You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.

Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.

[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.

There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos - pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.