The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it's what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

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?