The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.

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

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

So much of science proceeds by telling stories.

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.