The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

Natural selection is just three factors - over-production, variation, and inheritance combined to produce adaptation to changing local environments. It's not a principle or progress; it's just a principle of local adaptation. You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense; you make creatures that are better suited to the changing climates of their local habitats.

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.