Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each.

As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

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