The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

We pass through this world but once.

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 pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists

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