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

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into two categories: items purchasable for supposed pleasure (such as alcohol), and illicit drugs.

If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.

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.