I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought.

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

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.

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade — a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense.

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.