We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

The myriad valleys could have arisen anywhere on the landscape. The current positions are quite accidental. If we could repeat the experiment, we might obtain no valleys at all, or a completely different system. Yet we now stand at the shore line contemplating the fine spacing of valleys and their even contact with the sea. How easy it is to be misled and to assume that no other landscape could possibly have arisen.

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.