The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

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

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

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.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.