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

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

Forelimbs of people, porpoises, bats and horses provide the classic example of homology in most textbooks. They look different, and do different things, but are built of the same bones. No engineer, starting from scratch each time, would have built such disparate structures from the same parts.

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.