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

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.