Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

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

You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

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.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.