Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

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

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

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.