When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.

History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.

Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.

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.

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

All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.