The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

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

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.

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.

The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.