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.

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

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.

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?

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.