The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

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.

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.