A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

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

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

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.