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.

Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day of their lives.

In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each.

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

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.