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

It's true that the level of scientific knowledge among adults is very low, but that's not because there isn't a natural interest. I think most kids are fascinated by the natural world. I've often said that if you could quantify the mental power involved in all the dinosaur names correctly known and correctly spelled by 5-year-old kids in America, you could move any mountain on earth.

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.

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

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.

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.