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

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

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