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

It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.

If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.