Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

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

Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

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

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.