Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence.