Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

... no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.

Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.

Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.