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

Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

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

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.