That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

Do you think it's possible that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions? ...What if humanity- that collective noun we so often employ- really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What it what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being?

Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.

You can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.

General principles should not be based on exceptional cases.

A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.