Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.