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

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

How did scientists get money in the past? They were either lucky and independently wealthy, like Darwin, or they had patrons, like Galileo. Universities or governments have become patrons only in the last few generations. Many of the great scientists of the past were in debt to their patrons in the same sense that modern scientists are influenced by what their granting agencies want.

Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.

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

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

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