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

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion.

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.